Union minister for communications and IT Kapil Sibal wants India to skip the industrial revolution and jump into the telecom revolution. “There is a triad of policies integrated with a vision for the future for an entire sector,” he said while speaking as the key note speaker at the curtain raiser ceremony for the 7th India Telecom hosted at Hotel Shangri-la in the national capital on Thursday.

Sibal said that with a teledensity of 78 percent, there are huge opportunities in India in the telecom sector and urged the industry players in manufacturing, IT and telecom to exploit those opportunities. He further added that these policies will give a clear cut program for the telecom industry for the next 10 to 15 years.

He said that according to the New Policies for Telecom (NPT), there will be full mobile portability in India in the year 2020. There will also be 100 percent rural teledensity in India by then; 600 million broadband connections and on demand broadband connections in India at the rate of 100 mega bytes per seconds

Sibal asserted that there will also be regularisation of licenses and the government will set up a corpus fun for indigenous research and development. “We will reposition the mobile as an instrument of empowerment in India,” he said.

The minister said that the growing telecom sector will make use of domestic manufacturing sector for at least 80 percent of its needs to bring an upsurge in the manufacturing sector. He said that he also plans to delicense additional bands for utilitarian services to the Panchayats. “We have been taking objective decisions (for the benefit of the sector) since 2010,” he said.

Ministers of state for communication and IT Milind Deora and Sachin Pilot were also present at the ceremony. The ministers urged for reducing misinformation, innuendos and half truths in the sector as they create a bad environment and hamper growth.