With the backing of the government, India will roll out 5G at the quickest rate in the world and see the greatest success of the next-generation telecom service, according to a top Nokia India official.

Speaking at a function hosted by the Foreign Correspondent Club on Friday night, Nokia India Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs, Amit Marwah, expressed worry over "infiltration equipment" in the telecom sector coming from nearby nations without specifically mentioning China.

India is on time; It's not running behind. Compared to other nations, the rest of the country is where the environment needs to grow. It has  a 5G ecosystem in place. The percentage of smartphones in India that are 5G ready is 10%. The fastest 5G rollout, which will be at least three times faster than what we have witnessed with 4G, will take place in India as Marwah remarked.

Over the coming two years, 5G services will gradually be available over the entire nation; Jio promises to do so by December 2023 and Bharti Airtel by March 2024.

Marwah claimed that India's telecom industry is growing well thanks to the production-linked incentive (PLI) programme

According to him, India participated in PLI 1.0.  There was  one of only a handful of businesses to achieve and even surpass the PLI 1.0 goal. Due to the fact that PLI 2.0 was even more intriguing, it abandoned the scheme and the one-year incentive. It has  been let go for a year due to the scale and volume of work in India. They reapplied for PLI 2.0, and as a result, they are now a part of PLI 2.0, which means they are increasing their investments and introducing more lines and goods.

The PLI scheme provides up to a 20-fold incentive on additional sales of Indian-made telecom equipment. In the second iteration of the PLI scheme, the government has given extra incentives for designing products in India.

Marwah claimed that manufacturing is doing very well in India, especially in the telecom sector.

"The only challenge right now is the availability of fabs which are semiconductors. 60-80 percent of what we manufacture requires semiconductors. That is the area where we still need to work on. There is still some kind of infiltration of equipment in telecom from neighbouring countries which need to have a little more vigilance and kind of stopping at the customs," Marwah said.

According to Deputy Director General (Policy) YGSC Kishore Babu of the Department of Telecom, India is projected to have a wider range of 5G adoption and applications than other nations. According to Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth at Tech Mahindra, 5G is India's greatest technological potential to unite what we have traditionally referred to as Bharat and India.

CEO of the Telecom Sector Skill Council Arvind Bali estimated that over 25 lakh personnel in the telecom industry need to be retrained and upgraded over the next several years due to the transition from 4G to 5G. He claimed that the TSSC is creating all of the curricula and the digital information needed to train employees in accordance with industry standards.