Mumbai

India aims to lead the world in the upcoming sixth-generation mobile technology and become a designer of global technology standards, Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Thursday, asserting that the country is moving from being a market for technology to becoming a maker of technology.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Scindia said India had lagged the world on 4G but marched with the world on 5G and would lead the world on the sixth-generation mobile communication technology.

"We were behind the world on 4G. We marched with the world on 5G, but I commit to you, we will lead the world on 6G," he said.

He said India's 6G mission had already started and the Bharat 6G Alliance was working towards contributing to global standards.

Scindia said India had also moved beyond being merely a technology market.

"India has moved. The paradigm has shifted. We were always a market for technology. We are now becoming a maker of technology. We were always a market of technology, but we are now becoming a designer of standards. We were always a market of technology, but we are now becoming a builder of platforms," he said.

Highlighting India's progress in telecom connectivity, Scindia said the country now had 5G capability across 99.9 per cent of its districts, covering 85 per cent of the population, with more than 500,000 5G Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) and capital expenditure of over Rs 4.5 lakh crore.

He said India had also become the "cheapest data capital of the world", with data costs falling from Rs 287 per gigabyte (GB) to Rs 9 per GB.

Scindia said the country's digital infrastructure was driving the growth of fintech, with the mobile phone becoming "the new bank branch" and the telecom network becoming "the new financial highway".

The minister said the next leap in fintech would be from connecting people to platforms to connecting intelligence with opportunity, with convergence between 5G, BharatNet, Aadhaar, UPI, fintech and AI.

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Scindia also stressed the need for greater digital security, saying the shift should be from detecting fraud after it happens to preventing it by anticipating risks before money leaves an account.