NEW DELHI - The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with its Saudi Arabian counterpart, the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) for future collaborative activities in their joint domain.

The TRAI, created in 1997 by an Act of India’s Parliament, is mandated to “nurture conditions for growth of India’s telecommunications in a manner which will enable the country to play a leading role in emerging global information society.”

The MoU with Saudi Arabia is the TRAI’s 20th such bilateral agreement globally and will promote bilateral engagement between India and the Gulf region in telecommunications.

Vandana Sethi, TRAI’s Advisor on international relations, said the MoU “formalises the long-standing bilateral relations” between India and Saudi Arabia in the area of communications regulation.

The MoU was signed at the inaugural session of a one-day international conference of Telecom regulators, hosted by the TRAI today.

India’s Minister for Communications, Jyotiraditya Scindia, said in a message to the conference that the evolution of non-terrestrial networks will “unlock new vistas, expanding the horizons of communication technologies, ultimately serving our collective journey towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs).”

The theme of the one-day conference is “Emerging Trends in Regulation”. It was attended by Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary General of International Telecommunication Union (ITU).