Govt to create ~500-cr fund for R&D in 5G

As India aims to become a leader in 5G — the fifth-generation mobile communications system — the government is working to create a ~500-crore fund for development of the technology. It has also set up a high-level committee to prepare a road map for the roll-out of 5G by 2020.

Officials say India doesn’t want to miss the opportunity this time, like in the case of 2G and 3G where it lagged other countries. For 5G, India wants to have its own standards and intellectual property rights (IPR) that will become part of the 5G global standards.

“We want to make sure that standard essential patents, etc, also have Indian IPR,” Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told Business Standard.

5G is expected to play a big role in the kind of services rural India needs, such as tele-health and tele-eduction.

“We have created a highlevel 5G committee that will work on vision, mission and goals of 5G. When the world will roll out 5G in 2020, I believe India will be on a par with them,” Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said. The government feels 5G provides an opportunity for industry to reach out to global markets and consumers to gain with economies of scale. Sundararajan said areas like internet of things (IoT), robotics, artificial intelligency (AI), and machine-tomachine communications (M2M) would be critically dependent on 5G. “Since India is already looking at all these areas and India already has very significant software capabilities (5G will be software driven), India wants to position itself as a leader in 5G, which is why we are beginning this work right now,” she added.

The proposed high-level committee will primarily look at three things — developing use-case scenarios to define how industry and others will use the 5G technology; preparing a road map on how to get the ecosystem ready — like various device manufacturers, platform providers, tools and technology providers; and looking into the regulatory aspect.