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IT and Telecom ministries to be merged within a week, Mahajan
New Delhi, Sep 27: The government will create a single ministry by merging the Information technology and Telecommunications ministries within a week.

This step would pave the way for convergence, Mr Pramod Mahajan, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, IT and Communications, said at the Global Telecom Summit here. The minister who took charge earlier this month in a ministerial reshuffle said the domestic gloom in the telecom sector as result of the worldwide economic slowdown would disappear within three to four months. ''We will enter 2002 with larger opportunities. This gloom will not last for more than 100 days.'' he said. Speaking at the summit, Country Manager, Motorola, Pramod Saxena said the telecom market is evolving into the next generation of telecommunications and ''we expect 50 per cent of the world's telephony to be wireless by 2010. 

Though voice will continue to be the dominant driver its share as a part of the revenue will continue to decrease''. This will result in quicker adoption of data and data services and it would fetch about 20-25 per cent of the mobile industry revenues by 2004. Mr Saxena said India is going to be an earlier adopter of 2.5 G services.'' One operator has already announced a GPRS launch next month and many more will follow soon,'' he said. 

India will have an opportunity to play a key role in application development for the wireless internet by leveraging India's large pool of software talent. Mr Saxena said Asia is registering the highest growth in subscribers at 26 per cent as against Europe which expects to have a negative growth of 17 per cent. By 2005, China will further dominate the market with almost 50 per cent of the subscribers in the region, India will move up and emerge as the third largest market in Asia. 
 
 
 


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