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Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu called India’s decision in 2020 to cancel its global tender to ensure that the country’s telecom future did not depend on foreign suppliers, which led to BSNL building its 4G stack, as a bold one. The technological advances being made by the BSNL and its partners in telecom and IT would make India a global leader by 2047, he asserted. Participating virtually from here in the nationwide launch of BSNL’s Swadeshi 4G (5G-ready) network installed by a BSNL-led consortium comprising the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), TCS and Tejas Networks Limited, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Jharsuguda in Odisha, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu said the days when the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) used to provide ‘lightning calls’ a week after being booked and India was clueless about the ways to harness the power of IT were gone. The telecom sector made rapid strides since Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave the nod for its deregulation, upon understanding its potential to transform not only the economy but also the lives of the common people. Former PMs H. D. Deve Gowda and I. K. Gujral were skeptical about opening up the telecom sector. Nevertheless, the Vajpayee Government facilitated the telecom sector revolution, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu said, recalling his key role in the project as the Head of the IT Task Force, during which he had fruitful interactions with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and studied how Lucent Technologies had mastered telecom equipment manufacturing. Tracing the evolution of the telecom sector, the CM said there were just 14.88 lakh subscribers in India in March 1997 and it swelled to over a billion now. The model of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which spurred digital payments, was being adopted by France and Singapore. This proved that India has the knowledge and capability to develop technologies for the world. He expressed confidence that India would have the 6G network by the year 2030 and stressed the need for patenting the upcoming innovations across the technology landscape. Mr. Naidu said the Andhra Pradesh government was set to operationalize India’s first Quantum Computer in Amaravati in January 2026 and highlighted the fact that no other State was rendering citizen services numbering 700-plus through WhatsApp. He said he would prove how smartphones improved the living standards of the DWCRA and MEPMA and vowed to make the most of the emerging telecom technologies for public good. Union Minister of State for Telecommunications Pemmasani Chandra Sekhar said the emphasis laid on bringing down the call and data rates, expanding rural connectivity and taking high-speed internet to the remotest areas of the country helped in revolutionizing the telecom sector. He pointed out that 60 lakh phones used to be manufactured annually in India by 2014-15 and the numbers went up to an astounding 33 crore per year now. Of the 195 countries, only four — Sweden (Ericsson), Finland (Nokia), China (Huawei) and South Korea (Samsung) — were dominant players in telecom gear manufacturing. India became the fifth country matching their scale. BSNL has only 1,00,000 mobile phone towers compared to Jio’s 4,00,000 and Airtel’s 5,00,000. The Swadeshi 4G would give a fillip to the PSU telecom major, he added. Minister for Health Y. Satya Kumar, Vijayawada MP Kesineni Sivanath, BJP State president P.V.N. Madhav, C-DOT CEO R. K. Upadhyay, BSNL Director (Consumer Fixed Access) Vivek Banzal and CGM (AP) M. Seshachalam were among those present.
