‘India to have 120 crore Internet users by 2026’

As the internet has become a thing of necessity, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar claimed that India would have 120 crore internet users by 2026. The minister also claimed that the contribution of the telecom sector in the GDP is estimated to rise up to 26 per cent by 2026 from 11 percent.

While spelling about the achievements of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the minister said that the telecom sector is growing and the country is moving towards becoming a USD 5 trillion economy by 2026.

As part of the ruling BJP’s election campaign on ‘UPA’s lost decade versus India’s Techade’, Chandrasekhar said that the UPA is in a tearing hurry to erase its past by rebranding itself.

In response to the no-confidence motion moved by the Opposition alliance INDIA, the minister said, “UPA wants everyone to forget its past and how it ran riot for 10 years...Well, the nation will

not forget. You can rebrand but reality won’t change. Democratic debate is about facts, not fiction.”

“Also, in a democracy, the opposition has the fundamental right to be delusional as much as they have the fundamental right to free speech,” Chandrasekhar said.

The minister further said that in UPA’s lost decade between 2004 and 2014, “when you talked about telecom you essentially talked only about scams like 2G and crony capitalism.”

“New terms were invented such as first-come-first-served instead of tenders. Today India is the fastest growing telecom connected nation in the world. We have on multiple occasions auctioned spectrum, created licences with transparency and every rupee gained from spectrum auction has been deployed in expansion of the government’s social schemes.”

The minister pointed out four important areas, among others, where the current BJP government has brought transformative changes to the telecom sector. The government worked extensively towards stopping corruption and crony capitalism, boosting investor confidence, reducing reliance on imports, and enhancing the quality of telecom services in the last nine years’ of the government.