The Tuesday Interview | '5G and emerging tech call for new legislation'

Ahead of a spectrum auction, minister of state for information technology says India is sailing into uncharted territory, and must regulate better. Earlier this month, the Modi government announced the auction of 5G spectrum, marking a generational shift in technology. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology, spoke to DH’s Amrita Madhukalya about the changes coming up. Edited excerpts.

What are the major changes consumers can expect with the introduction of 5G?

It is a huge jump in the evolution of wireless technologies; it is faster and represents a generational shift in technology. It will be the first to have sensor-to-sensor and machine-to-machine tech. In the early days, the Internet was about communicating between colleges, which progressively became communication between individuals, and then commercial entities became part of it. People were always at the centre of it. In 5G, there will be entities like machines and sensors on the Internet. The complexity and diversity of the Internet and the data ecosystem will go through a huge change. The full potential of the Internet under 5G is not fully defined. When we transitioned from 3G to 4G, everybody knew that a faster Internet means that some services would get better. The enormity of the entire ecosystem under 5G is difficult to predict or foretell. It is a catalyst and a force multiplier, and the start of something new.

How long will the auctioned spectrum be valid?

Spectrum is given to commercial entities for 20 years, to exploit, and for them to take their services and build a business model. In return, they pay the auction price to the government of India and the state exchequer. The Modi government has always maintained that all public resources will be shared with private sector companies to deliver services to the public.

Industry players say they were expecting a lower price, and they feel this might lead the industry into debt. What do you have to say to that?

I was a telecom player for 10-12 years in the early days of the industry, and then a policy maker for 16-odd years. Before every auction, the same cast of characters talks about how the prices should be lower. Everybody knows that spectrum is scarce, and so valuable. If they can get it for free, they would love it. But that’s not what the government wants. We want to maximise the benefits to the exchequer, so that our development efforts can be funded by the lease of the spectrum. There are operators who will bid for it, and operators will have a different trajectory in terms of profits. It is not in our interest to make it too expensive or too cheap. We have citizen groups who do not want it to be too cheap. This kind of complaining has been par for the course before every spectrum auction. One must remember that part of the reason why the UPA government and A Raja decided to hand out 2G spectrum for free is that they had a couple of operators stand up and defend that decision, saying that it will help prices remain cheap. The only transparent way, we believe, is to auction spectrum.

Big tech companies are entering the spectrum space for the first time.

I’m not sure who among the big tech players are bidding. From the government and consumer’s perspectives, the more the companies that offer wireless services, the more choice there is. There are two points here, one is big tech companies getting 5G for operating 5G services, another is big tech companies working on certain bands of the spectrum, such as 6-GHz. They want that to be unlicensed and opened up for Wi-fi and other access services. This conversation is going on all around the world, including in the US, where the FCC has taken a decision to unlicense that band. It is in our interest to have more players. We want 1.2 billion Indians to be connected quickly, and our growth in the last four-five years is 800 million. We would like a diversity of access players, which is good for the digital economy. I am not sure of the terms of the auction.

Recently, there were reports of Google letting go of an engineer who said that search machines are sentient. Scientists have also said that technological singularity, where machines take over humans in intelligence, will occur by 2045. Is this going to be difficult to navigate in future?

The question, to my mind, is, ‘What are the challenges that 5G, AI and emerging tech pose for evolution?’ Our policies are focused on an Internet that is open, safe, accountable and trustworthy. What if AI runs amok, and big tech companies have so much data globally that it is used against us? Machine-learning and AI are risks, and ethical use of these are important for our policies to understand and regulate. That is why I have said publicly that we will soon have a Digital India Act, which will replace the IT Act, a 22-year-old piece of legislation that does not even mention the Internet. We are now sailing into uncharted territory in terms of impact. Governments across the globe, for the last several years, celebrated social media and big tech, but failed to regulate them enough. Going forward, we have made it clear we will have policies and rules to ensure safety of digital nagriks online.

With elections looming in Karnataka, where does the BJP stand, especially in the light of the hijab protests, and the Congress and JD(S) going their separate ways in the Rajya Sabha elections?

The people of Karnataka, who have experienced Congress, supported by JD(S) tacitly, for many decades, know what to expect. Between 2019 and now, they have had a government that fought floods and Covid effectively. On governance, people know if they can trust Bommai, D K Shivakumar, or Kumaraswamy. All of these protests are created deliberately. We will see more of them before 2023. Siddaramaiah with his caste vote bank politics is irrelevant, and Shivakumar uses money to drive his politics, and Kumaraswamy is Kumaraswamy. In contrast, we have a party with a track record of seva, sushashan aur gareeb kalyan.