Union minister for communication (independent charge) and junior railway minister Manoj Sinha, in a free-wheeling interview with Rohan Dua, shares how mobile tariff has come down and how the railway ministry is working to spruce up infrastructure across the country. Excerpts:

Your portfolios — railways and telecommunication — had become synonymous with UPA 2 scams. What difference have you brought about?

It’s not just these two ministries. I can proudly say we have have run a scam-free government over the past four years under PM Narendra Modi — whether its spectrum, licensing, processing, mergers and acquisitions (Idea-Vodafone). The objective was transparent auctions of spectrum and bridge digital divide .

How did it help both a consumer and corporate houses?

In June 2014, data cost was Rs 269 per GB. By 2018, we brought it down to just Rs 19. Similarly, call tariff has shrunk to barely 17 paisa from 51 paisa. Now the how part. We have spent Rs 60,000 crore between 2014 till now on telecom infrastructure as compared to a paltry Rs 9,900 crore spent by UPA 2. We have doubled mobile base transceiver stations from 7.9 lakh to 18 lakh and optical fibre cable (OFC) from 7 lakh km to 14 lakh km.

Varanasi, Rae Bareli, Amethi are key constituencies for 2019. How did you differentiate in railway projects?

Let me tell you I have made no discrimination. In fact, if PM Modi ensured mobility at Varanasi, Manduadih, Mughalsarai and Ayodhya, and Prayag Ghat among 11 stations then we also sanctioned Rs 358 crore for doubling of track between Rae Bareli and Amethi. Why didn’t Congress sanction this? Not just that, we also ordered doubling of tracks in Sonia Gandhi ’s constituency as well as in a smaller station as Utretia for Rs 298 crore. We are bringing 102 km of railway lines every year as compared to 13 km in UPA 2 at an investment of Rs 5,278 crore every year.

How positive are you on 5G? Any concerns on difficult terrains in India?

We missed the 3G and 4G buses, but 5G is a bus we cannot afford to miss. A high-level forum has been set up and a 5G test bed is being established through budgetary support. The testing phase just ended at IIT Delhi and Chennai. On connectivity front, we have initiated Rs 10,800-crore projects in the northeast and set up 2,335 mobile towers in Left wing extremism-affected areas in Chhattisgarh, Bihar, UP and Maharashtra. Besides, we also set up submarine cable in Andaman at Rs 2,000 crore.

