By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, FEB 21, 2017: INDIA yesterday offered the secure ICT products to ASEAN countries at competitive costs and also renewed its pledge to share "know how" and "know Why" as New Delhi is willing to provide long-term financing for buying Indian telecom products and services.

Inaugurating the India Telecom-2017 here, Minister of Communications, Mr Manoj Sinha said that Indian Telecom companies are willing to share technologies and enter into joint production ventures to develop entire telecom eco-system in any host country. In the event organized to commemorate the 25th year of the ASEAN-India relations, the Minister urged the participating countries to ensure that Indian telecom products and services should become their number one choice as they accelerate the digital connectivity initiatives. Shri Sinha informed that during the 13th ASEAN-India Summit in November, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had committed a Line of Credit of 1 billion US dollars to promote projects that support physical and digital connectivity between India and ASEAN. The Minister said that both the sides have complementary skills, huge markets and capacity to develop new technology and products to serve the people.

Mr Sinha said that Indian communications industry has made great progress over the last decade and with an overall tele-density of 88 and rural tele-density of 53, India has the second largest telecommunications network in the world. Referring to one of the lowest mobile tariffs in the world, Shri Sinha said that India has already overtaken the United States to become the world’s 2nd largest Internet market, with more than 220 million Broadband subscribers and more than 450 million users, only behind China.