New Delhi: The pre-Budget economic survey presented on Tuesday in the Parliament said that the spearheading growth in the services sector to play a key role in the economy.
The telecom sector will connect 65 crore subscribers in the next five years, more than tripling in size from its current level.
The survey also revealed that the impressive progress in information technology and enabled services and fast addition stock of telephone connections particularly mobiles played a key role in the growth.
Current telecom connections stand at 196 million and are expected to be 200 million by the end of this month. By 2012, the country is expected to have a total of 650 million telephone connections, including 66 million wired and 584 million wireless connections, it said.
The Survey sought the provision of 200 million rural telephony connections to significantly boost rural telecom-density to 25 per cent from the current level of 1.7 per cent.
It also called for broadband connectivity to be available on demand without speed limit, with connections being provided to health centres, schools and panchayats.
It envisaged the number of broadband and internet subscribers would reach 20 million and 40 million respectively by 2010.
The number of internet subscribers grew at 25 per cent while broadband users grew only to 1.32 million in 2005-06 from 0.18 million.
With India becoming the fastest growing telecom market globally and tariffs dipping to the lowest, telecom-density increased to 16.8 per cent in December.
India is also expected to emerge as a manufacturing hub for telecom equipment due to rising demand for a wide range of such equipment.
With agency inputs
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