Affordable, locally produced devices are key to fuelling an expected explosion in IoT technologies in India, Samsung Electronics India exeuctive Srinivasan Sundararajan said in an interview with The Economic Times (ET).

The head of the South Korea-based vendor’s Networks Business in India said the millions of new devices set to be deployed needed to be affordable, interoperable and locally produced to keep costs down.

Samsung’s Networks business supplies the equipment behind Reliance Jio’s NB-IoT network currently in operation in Mumbai. The two companies announced the launch at Mobile World Congress 2018 and subsequently began rollout.

In a statement made at the time, the partners said NB-IoT networks from Jio would soon “impact other parts of the country with compelling use cases.”

India is tipped to for huge growth in the number of IoT devices by 2021. In November 2017, the ET reported comments from minister Ravi Shankar Prasad predicting the number would grow from 200 million in November 2017 to at least 2 billion by 2021.

Prasad added technologies including IoT, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) would play an important role in making the country a “digital superpower” with a digital economy worth $1 trillion by 2024. Its government committed funding through a number of schemes in a bid to fuel this growth.