Leveraging Internet-of-Things technology and promoting innovation are crucial for solving practical problems in India, a top official said today. "The need of promoting innovation and harnessing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) is imperative for solving practical problems in India. All initiatives in IoT should translate into business models which can be replicated across sectors," Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said while inaugurating a seminar on IoT.

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The event was jointly organised by Deprtment of Telecommunications in collaboration with New Delhi chapter of global telecom industry body GSM Association. Sundararajan also underlined the need to work across silos in technology, policy, regulation, licences, and use cases.  She said that there should be a drive to spread awareness and initiate capacity building across several key ministries like health, agriculture, transport, urban development and energy as use cases will be initiated from these ministries. 

The seminar is the first among series of capacity building programmes planned with the support of GSMA as per the bilateral agreement between DoT and GSMA signed during Mobile World Congress 2018 at Barcelona. 

Technology considerations for IoT, including the spectrum allocation, business models for IoT, and policy considerations were discussed during the seminar, an official statement said.

Under IoT all products including car, air conditioners, television, electricity meters etc can be connected and operated with help of internet from even remote locations. The Department of Telecom has already issued guidelines for SIMs that can be used for IoT devices including eSIM. 

IoT deployment is one of the important focus technology area in the draft National Digital Communication Policy 2018 released recently. 

As per recent estimates, IoT market in India stands at USD 5.6 million with 200 million connected units in 2016 and this is expected to grow to USD 15 billion with 2.7 billion units by 2020, the statement said. 

"Globally, the number of IoT devices is estimated to have increased 31 per cent year-over-year to 8.4 billion in 2017. It is projected that there will be 30 billion devices by 2020. The global market value of IoT is projected to reach USD 7.1 trillion by 2020," it added. 

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DoT Member for services and technology Prabhash Singh, GSMA Public Policy Head for APAC Emanuela Lecchi along with other senior DoT officers attended the event.