Digitalisation & Data Protection – Changing Landscape of Indian Telecom Sector

Saswata Dhar, Executive Vice President Legal & Country Counsel, Vodafone India Ltd

The telecommunications sector in India is witnessing rapid changes through consolidation and an increase in the number of subscribers with significantly higher data usage across country, in recent times. The Government of India (GOI) policy on Digital India initiative and e- governance is a paradigm shift towards provisioning of secure, affordable and high quality telecommunication services to all citizens, and leveraging telecom infrastructure to enable e-governance for an equitable and inclusive development across the nation. The key focus being on increasing rural tele-density from a level of 39% in 2012 to 100% by year 2020, the NTP sets the vision of ‘broadband for all’, achieving 600 million broadband subscriptions by 2020. The Telecom Sector has therefore emerged as one of the key driver of economic and social development in India. This coupled with the high population and demographic pattern of India with one of the largest young population in the world, there shall be data consumption for various purposes such as music, video and HD streaming, social networking, financial transactions etc.` there shall be both demand side pull and supply side push making India the fastest growing market for the data consumption.