IoT to create around 15 million jobs: Telecom Secretary

Amidst the time, when IT industry is struggling to create new jobs, Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to create 10-15 million jobs in the economy, according to telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan.

Addressing a news conference at the IoT India Congress 2017, Sundararajan said, "In Bengaluru and other places, there have been concerns about how Indian IT will cope with new challenges and new technologies. We believe, or rather it is estimated, that India can have 10-15 million new jobs created in IoT alone."

She added that the new sector has huge potential for job creation and most of these will not be created by large companies but by startups.

Two days ago, Verizon released a report which said that the Internet of Things (IOT) platform market is expected to hit $1.6 billion by 2020 globally, growing at a rate of 35 per cent year-on-year.

The State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017 report stated that the biggest growth will come from B2B applications which can generate nearly 70 per cent of potential value enabled by IoT.

Besides, the IoT space is also booming in India with about 65 per cent of Indian startups working on it. The government is looking at ways to lay out regulations for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.

“Towards the beginning of next year, we will have a complete set of best practices for IoT,“ she said.

Besides, the ministries of IT and telecom are working together to bring in robust security protocols for new technologies.

Earlier this month, the Telecom and Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) came up with its first set of recommendation on licensing, privacy, spectrum availability, SIM requirements and the like for enabling IoT in India.

“IoT is the huge flow of data between people and machines, and with machines themselves... We need the current infrastructure to be upgraded. Our (government) effort will be to ensure that we are able to incentivise these new technologies,” said Sundararajan.