From 2G to 5G: What Prime Minister Modi’s India Mobile Congress Keynote Reveals About a Nation in Digital Transition

I am in Delhi this week for India Mobile Congress 2025, and there’s an undeniable sense that India wants to be seen as a digital superpower. Prime Minister Modi’s opening line captured it: we once struggled with 2G; now we have 5G across nearly every district. The statement drew applause — and it should. The speed of India’s network rollout has been remarkable by any standard.

More than 600 million people in India have subscribed to the mobile internet since 2015, helping the digital economy triple in size to $370 billion. Yet connectivity and usage remain uneven, especially outside urban areas. Coverage doesn’t automatically mean capacity, and adoption doesn’t yet match ambition. The networks exist — but the full ecosystem that turns them into productivity, innovation, and revenue is only just forming.

India’s 5G success so far has been built on extraordinary execution: aggressive spectrum auctions, fast tower deployment, and a push to make data affordable — often cited as “cheaper than a cup of tea.” Yet the next stage will demand something harder: converting connectivity into value. For all the enthusiasm, large-scale industrial 5G use cases are still pilots, and monetisation models are uncertain.

Government policy has been central to the story. Digital public infrastructure has created a powerful digital foundation. It’s what allows India to imagine a connected economy at population scale. But whether 5G (and eventually 6G) can replicate that impact in enterprise and industry remains an open question.

The supply side, though, tells a more complex story. Domestic manufacturing now accounts for 99% of phones sold in India, but R&D investment remains under 1% of GDP — among the lowest of major economies — meaning India’s innovation capacity hasn’t yet caught up with its production scale. The GSMA Intelligence Digital Nations Index gives India an overall score of 52 out of 100: strong on security, but weak in innovation and data governance, where scores fall below 40. These gaps could slow the next phase of digital growth if not addressed.

Infrastructure tells a similar tale. India’s 5G coverage is impressive, yet only about 30% of mobile towers are connected via fibre — well short of the government’s 70% target. And while AI and cloud adoption are rising fast, data-centre capacity remains under 5 GW — a fraction of China’s 32 GW. Bridging that gap will be critical to support the AI-driven and low-latency applications highlighted at the Congress this week.

The optimism here is unmistakable — and understandable. Few countries have combined digital inclusion, political will, and scale quite like this. But even as India positions itself as a testbed for 6G, AI-native networks, and satellite connectivity, the fundamentals still matter affordability, spectrum policy, and commercial sustainability.

The transformation is genuine — just incomplete. The hard part now isn’t rolling out more base stations; it’s turning coverage into capability, and capability into competitiveness. That’s the difference between a connected nation and a digitally empowered one.