India is largest connected nation with 800 million broadband users, says minister

The Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that India is the largest “connected” nation in the world today with more than 800 million broadband users.

He was addressing the concluding ceremony of the India Internet Governance Forum 2022, Delhi on Sunday with the theme ‘Leveraging Techade for Empowering Bharat’.

Speaking on the occasion Chandrasekhar also said, “5G and the largest rural broadband connectivity network project at BharatNet will have 1.2 billion Indian users constituting the single largest presence on the global internet. He further said that we also expect further technological innovations as well as updated regulatory policies to remain relevant. The deep involvement by all stakeholders will be the third leg of this Global Standard Cyber Law Framework that we hope will catalyse the Indian internet and the economy, he added.

The MoS said that India now has a tremendous powerful offering, identity authentication to a very diverse and rich suite of applications, and improved accessibility to the internet to countries in the Global South which have not been able to step up and create the same sort of pace of digitization of the economy is an internetization of their economies.

He further said that during the G20 Presidency, the Prime Minister declared that he will be open to India offering that platform to all those nations in the Global South that want to transform their digital economy and their governance model as India. The multistakeholder architecture of the Indian internet happened after a lot of effort. In the next few years, this multistakeholder engagement must go beyond the intellectual academic discussion to ensure the internet grows and innovation grows while keeping both safe and trusted and accountable for all the billion digital nagriks of India, he added.

The India Internet Government Forum is an initiative associated with the UN Internet Governance Forum (UN-IGF). The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multi-stakeholder platform bringing representatives together from various groups, all at par to discuss public policy issues related to the Internet.