(Image source from: Twitter.com/narendramodi)

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that there is a need for resilient and security supply chains after which he launched 5G Use Case Labs for 100 educational Institutions. These would be used for the development of Applications in the fields of agriculture, health and education. The higher internet speed will help to improve the ease of living and farming, education, healthcare etc. Narendra Modi made these statements at the India Mobile Congress (IMC). The labs are announced by the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during the budget speech this year.

The Indian government will provide 80 percent of the capital expenditure and 100 percent of the operational expenses for the next four years. The Telecommunications Department has set up the labs. Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology, National Institutes of Technology and others will fund the 20 percent capital expenditure for these labs. Every lab will have ten faculty members along with 50 students. Several startups will be engaged with these labs to develop apps and solutions. 5G standalone infrastructure (mid-band), 5G SIMs, dongles, IoT gateway, router, application server, etc will be the equipment. As per the Indian government, these labs will start operations from March 2024.