Accepting that telecom companies will have a bigger role to play in realising the Digital India dream, TRAI Chairman RS Sharma said that the India's telecom sector has reached a stage when data will be the next big thing.
Stressing the need for regulations for orderly growth, Sharma said, "From the regulator perspective TRAI's approach is to have a light touch regulatory system, but at the same time in every sector you do require regulations for orderly growth. As far as data is concerned there are still many issues, one of them being- who owns the data. To address such issues we have brought out various consultation papers. I feel we need to understand that we need to have a clear regulatory framework with no ambiguities for an orderly growth."
Speaking about the governments smart cities initiative, Sharma added, "Smart cities are going to be one particular aggregation of M2M and IoT technologies. It is important from our country's perspective that while we certainly follow the global standard, we have to ensure that the systems are inter-operative. For smart cities especially we buy solutions and it is important to ensure that those systems which are inter operable" Sharma said.
"Our dream is to transform India into a digitally empowered society and for this digital infrastructure is a prerequisite. We all have to think together if we want to transform this country and we need a reliable and robust connectivity to make it happen. From TRAI perspective, this should be one of our top priorities. As we know, the next big thing in the telecom sector is going to be data and given the fact that India today is technologically empowered and initiatives like Start-Up India, Digital India etc are creating a vibrant system like never before and the telecom sector has played a huge role in this transformation."
