New agenda: India’s own telecom gear

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman RS Sharma played the role of the child who shouted that the emperor had no clothes on, when he told this newspaper that manufacturing core telecom equipment is a strategic as well as an economic imperative. Failure to act on serious indigenous defence production and failure to create a local industry in telecom equipment sit ill with India’s aspirations for great power status and strategic autonomy.

Sharma echoed the sentiments reportedly related to then-Chinese supremo Jiang Zemin by Huawei founderRen Zhengfei in the early 1990s, that switching equipment technology was related to national security, and that a nation that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military.