Despite recession, IT and communications saw 7.1% growth: IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad

India’s IT and Communications Ministries registered 7.1% growth even during COVID-19, Communication and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday. This is despite the global and local recession, he said. In his inaugural address at CyFy, an annual cybersecurity conference organised by the think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF), he hailed the Indian government's digital schemes and argued that the digital ecosystem brought about "some degree of sanity" during COVID-19. Prasad said that through postal operations, mobile phone, internet and other forms of digital connectivity, his ministries could “afford some degree of relief” to the people during the pandemic when everything was shut down. “While COVID has caused enormous problem, suffering, COVID has also established one thing: every challenge brings an opportunity,” he said, "and the opportunity here is the potential of digital technologies". Since Prasad was talking about…