 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2019 here in Budapest, Hungary. We are very pleased to be joined in the studio by Dr Ram Sehwak Sharma, who is the Chairman of Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India. Dr Sharma, welcome to the studio. Thank you very much. Nice to see you again. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about innovating together, connectivity that matters. What does that mean to you? It's the event theme, but why is it important? See, what is happening is that the communication, the connectivity is the one which is the single most important driver which is changing the world today. You know, you have all kinds of innovations going around the connectivity. Digital infrastructure is an extremely important part of the innovative ecosystem. You have today Industry 4.0, the 5G and all other issues are developing around that. So I think this is the central, you know, kind of infrastructure which is going to play a very important role in almost every sector of the economy, be it health, education, other kinds of agriculture and communications. So certainly that is the one which is going to become the fulcrum of the innovations happening. In terms of innovation, technology, policy, strategy, which one of these do you think is going to have the most impact on digital transformation? I think thus far we have had a situation where the connectivity was a single vertical. Now we are going to have the 5G coming into the picture. We are going to have telecommunication, this infrastructure is not only a small vertical, but actually a horizontal. It's going to become a platform to provide services to various other sectors. So therefore 5G is I think the single most sort of upcoming technology that's going to transform the way we do business, the way we do manufacturing, production, all other kinds of things. So that I think is the very important part. And we have to build innovations around that because there will be use cases of 5G and those use cases will depend on the country, the state of its development and other kinds of infrastructure available. And I think that's where we should all focus on. What role has the telecommunication regulatory authority of India have in widening access to digital economy in India? See as a telecommunication sector regulator and as I said the telecommunication sector is not really now vertical, it's a horizontal platform. We have to recognize that reality and actually go around ensuring that that particular role is facilitated by our regulations. So therefore our regulatory approach is A, it's a minimal regulation and B, it should facilitate the deployment of technology to the service of the people. So essentially that's the role which we are playing. We are recognizing the opportunities wherever they exist and to ensure that we create platforms, we create situations, circumstances where things get deployed. Like touch regulation? Absolutely. Like touch regulation, minimal regulation and of course we should regulate only when it is required. For example, the tariff. Now tariff is unregulated or in some sense the forbearance situation lasts about 15 years and we are not going to change that. So similarly we don't require regulating everything. Market forces, whenever we see a market failure only then we will intervene. That's the broad philosophy which TRAI has got and I think it has paid dividends. Today India is the second largest vibrant telecom market. We have 1.2 billion mobile connections. We have 600 billion internet users. We have the minimal tariffs in the world and we have a huge data economy. The number of, we consume about 6.5 exabytes of data per month and per capita data consumption per month is 10 gigabytes. So these are the statistics which are extremely staggering and that shows the vibrancy in the market. Very promising indeed. I wanted to ask you how can governments best balance the need for data to provide innovative beneficial services against privacy and security concerns? I think that's a very important question. We should actually, we are creating a data privacy regulation, data privacy legislation in our country and we are cognizant of the fact that the data security, privacy, data ownership, these are some very very important concepts and unless you tackle these issues there will be a trust deficit in the digital transactions and therefore in order to ensure that people do digital transactions with complete confidence it's important that we have very clear policies around data protection and privacy and that's what our country is trying to do. We are also trying to create an architecture because we have a digital identity infrastructure in place in India. We also have a platform of payment services which is essentially the digital financial services and around these we are also creating the data empowerment architecture which means that every individual who is the owner of the data can utilize the data for its own benefit, for his or her own benefit and that's actually a very empowering kind of concept which actually is anchored onto the digital identity and the digital consent. So once you have the digital consent of the individual and also when he has, he can use his own data for his own benefit that I think is very very empowering for the individual. At the same time we should ensure that the individual's data is not misused and is not put to any use which can harm him or her. It's difficult with consent forms of course because people sometimes sign them but they don't know what they're reading so it has to be obviously very very clearly indicated. A couple of things which are required is that the companies must collect data whichever is necessary. You can't have too many data points being collected about an individual which your application does not require. Number one and number two, you must also have very clearly articulated principles of the contract as to what will you do with the citizens data. Many times your contracts run into hundreds of pages which nobody understands so you must have those things very clearly articulated in the minimal words commonly understood language. Finally I just want to ask you what's the value for you of attending events such as ITU, Telecom World? I think it's a platform, it's an extremely interesting platform where regulators, governments, private sector, everybody comes together and they share ideas and I think what's important is that everybody does not need to reinvent the wheel. So people should collaborate, learn and benefit from each other's experience and I think that's the best value which these kind of platforms offer. Wonderful, Dr. Sharma, thank you for joining us in the studio and we look forward to catching you up with you again at some other ITU event too. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.