India will be in the top 3 economies in the world soon: Mukesh Ambani

Reliance Industries Chairman and Asia’s richest person Mukesh Ambani on Monday (24) said that India will be in the top three economies in the world, whether it is in five years or 10 years.

Ambani was speaking to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a fireside chat in Mumbai, India.

He added that India has the opportunity to become the premier digital society of the world.

Mukesh Ambani said: “When it happens (being in the top 3 economies), our opportunity is - will we be the most technically-enabled society? Will we have our development enabled by all tools of technology and can we be a pacesetter in terms of using all technology.”

He predicted that in the coming two decades, the next generations of India will see a very different India and that everyone should be working towards that.

“I can easily say mobile networks in India are better and on par with anybody else in the world and that’s the big change,” Mukesh Ambani said. “That’s India we start in 2020. Think about your (Nadella’s) own journey in 1992 when you joined Microsoft, India was $300 billion, today India is $300 trillion and fundamentally this whole progress has happened on the back of technology in a certain way.”

While crediting the growth of this paradigm shift to tech companies such as TCS and Infosys, Ambani also said that Jio played a small role in the digital India vision put forth by PM Modi in 2014.

“Pre Jio, we had 256kbps as broadband speed. Post Jio we have 20Mbps as average speed on mobile data available in every single village in India. Pre-Jio, the price of data in India was between Rs 300-500 and for poorest of poor price as high as Rs 10,000 a GB. Post Jio, its Rs 12-14 per GB,” Ambani told Nadella.

The Indian tycoon said that every small business and every entrepreneur has the potential in India to become a Dhirubhai Ambani or Bill Gates and that’s what differentiates India from the rest of the world.

Reliance Jio and Microsoft entered into a long-term partnership in August 2019 aimed at accelerating the digital transformation of the Indian economy and society.