Democratised data will help unleash the next phase of economic growth, believes Mukesh Ambani, and he is pulling out all the stops to make this digital-age currency affordable and available to every Indian
Data is the new oil: When Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), made that statement at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum in February 2017, what he meant was that, simply put, data has the same power to fuel human capabilities which oil has had over the last five decades. He should know: Ambani is, after all, the leader of India’s largest company by turnover, which has generated billions of dollars in wealth over the years by refining crude and manufacturing petroleum products.
At the same forum, Ambani also said it was only four years ago that he “truly understood the true meaning of the term exponential”, adding, “I believe we are on the verge of exponential change, where we have the opportunity to solve large problems in a short span of time.”
Few would have imagined how the key themes of Ambani’s talk—data and exponential change—could come together to change the paradigm of India’s telecommunications industry and alter the way in which Indians consume data. Yet, over the last one year—since Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio), RIL’s broadband wireless and digital services company commenced operations—that is exactly what has happened.
It took Jio a while to get to this point.
RIL announced its foray into telecom in 2010 after it acquired Infotel Broadband, a company that had won pan-India wireless airwaves through a government auction. The next six years were spent building and testing a greenfield ecosystem using the latest technology, including partners, vendors, and an infrastructure network comprising optic fibre cables and transmission towers. The ambitious project, on which the oil-to-yarn and retail conglomerate has spent close to ₹2 lakh crore, had its fair share of naysayers along the way as well. Some doubted whether diversification away from the core oil refining, marketing and petrochemicals business was prudent; others questioned whether the world’s first all-IP (internet protocol) network over VoLTE (voice over LTE) that Jio was building would work, since there was no global precedence of the same.
Jio has 138.6 million subscribers consuming 1.25 billion GB of data a month currently
(This story appears in the 29 December, 2017 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)