Reliance Industries to invest Rs 3,000 crore in Odisha to creating the state's digital infra

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, committed to invest Rs 3,000 crore in Odisha over the next three years to ‘take the power of digital’ to every nook of the state.

At Make in Odisha Conclave 2018, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries (RIL), announced that the company will invest Rs 3,000 crore in the state over the next three years. Most of this investment is aimed at creating Odisha’s digital infrastructure.

The RIL group has already invested over Rs 6,000 crore in Odisha and is one of the largest investors in the state. Ambani said, “Reliance and Jio are dependable partners in the Make in Odisha mission and Make New Odisha vision.”

Reliance Industries aims to transform the state with its Jio network that has already connected all its cities, towns and 43,000 of its villages.

“Our philosophy has a clear goal – to empower everyone in the march of development. For Reliance, Jio is not just another business, it is a mission to transform India, to transform Odisha,” added Ambani.

Numerous Odisha villagers bought affordable smartphones in the last eight months. “For most of these villagers, it is their pehla (first) phone, pehla radio and music player, pehla TV, pehla camera and also their pehla introduction to the Internet and Artificial Intelligence in their lives. All this at only Rs 100 per month,” he said.

He also reported that the per capita data consumption in Odisha is among the highest in the country and that people in the state are using advanced digital connectivity for education, financial services and entertainment.

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Jio claims to be leading India’s digital transformation by contributing to the Digital India vision of making India the fastest digitising economy in the world. Since Jio commenced operations over two years ago, we have become the first in 'mobile data consumption' in the world.

“We are committed to connecting everyone and everything, everywhere always with the highest quality and the most affordable price,” said Ambani.

The company has also created sustainable new employment opportunities – both direct and indirect, to over 30,000 people in Odisha.

New age digital technologies

With everything in the world going digital – music, movies, commerce, banking, cars, homes, healthcare and education, Reliance has a big reason to focus on digital businesses. They believe that digital technologies will completely transform every sector of the economy.

The company aims is to take the power of ‘digital life’ to every nook and corner of the state, especially to rural Odisha. They plan to improve the quality of education, healthcare and provide a large number of newer livelihood opportunities and aim to empower and enable every citizen by connecting them to each other and to the world.

Reliance is also working with the state government on ‘Mission Shakti’ initiative to integrate several lakh women with the digital mainstream.

With JioGigaFriber, the company has begun to push in the fixed broadband space. “Our aim and resolve are to ensure that India rises from the present 135^th rank to be amongst the top three nations in fixed broadband within the next three years,” said Ambani.

Largest online-to-offline commerce platform

Mukesh Ambani also claimed that Reliance is working on creating the world’s largest online-to-offline commerce platform. He said that the company is working on transforming the lives and businesses of three crore merchants in the country by enabling to do everything that large enterprises and commerce players can do.

It also assures that this initiative for Odisha’s small and medium entrepreneurs will create millions of employment opportunities for the youth of Odisha in their own state.

Additionally, Reliance Industries is also partnering with the state government to set up ‘Reliance Foundation – Odisha high-performance Athletics Centre’ to train local talent under world-renowned experts to turn them into ‘Olympic Medal winners of tomorrow’.

Ambani signed off by saying, “We shall together make Odisha the most globalised region of India once again as it was in the past when it had established trade and cultural links with South-East Asia.”