India needs to spend Rs 1 lakh crore on digital infrastructure: Sterlite’s Agarwal

NEW DELHI: There is a need to bring parity in spending on physical and digital infrastructure, and a Rs 1 lakh crore combined annual investment would further strengthen telecom backhaul and augment fibre-to-the-home connectivity, a top executive of an Indian multinational company said.

“We now need to start thinking about parity between the two infrastructures. The digital infrastructure has to be thought in a similar way as we think of the physical infrastructure for the transport of goods and services, for the transport of data and information,” Sterlite Technologies Group chief executive Anand Agarwal said.

Agarwal was speaking at a digital roundtable organised by ETTelecom and Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association of India (Taipa) together with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman Ram Sewak Sharma and Bharti Infratel chairman Akhil Gupta.