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India must aim to expand 5G connectivity to around 100 crore mobile subscribers by 2030: Scindia
Oct-06-2026

Union telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has said that India should aim to expand 5G connectivity to around 100 crore mobile subscribers by 2030, up from 50 crore at present. He said 5G services were officially introduced in India in October 2022 and, over a period of 23 months, the country established 5 lakh base stations with investment worth $550 billion. He said ‘today 99.9 per cent of our districts are connected by 5G. 86 per cent of our population and close to 500 million customers are on 5G alone in a period of two years--the fastest 5G rollout in the world. We will not stop here. It is our target that by 2030, we must have a billion customers from 500 million today on 5G.’

The minister said that 5G systems are connecting machines with intelligence for transactions, and the fintech revolution, which is part of the AI revolution, is inseparable from the connectivity revolution. He said ‘today in India, we conduct close to 49 per cent of global real-time digital payment volumes. That means one in every two transactions across 170 countries in the world is done in India. Therefore, every QR code payment behind it lies an invisible architecture, an architecture of telecom networks carrying transactions, an architecture of digital identities carrying trust.’

He further said that the government has undertaken a $16-billion programme called Bharatnet to provide broadband connectivity to every gram panchayat, which is an agglomeration of three to four villages, with a 100 Mbps connection. The minister touched upon the government's effort to curb digital frauds through the Sanchar Saathi platform. He said ‘Sanchar Saathi app has 300 million downloads, where we report suspicious connections, report fraud, and block suspicious mobiles. Our AI-powered Astra system has disconnected 8.8 million mobile phones that were suspicious of fraud.’ He added that ‘the Reserve Bank of India has mandated our financial fraud risk indicator to be adopted by all banking institutions to protect citizens' interests.’


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