Speaker Details
Rajiv Mehrotra
Founder, CEO and Chairman, VNL
Rajiv Mehrotra is the Founder, CEO and Chairman of VNL which has developed a solar-powered, zero OPEX GSM system specifically designed to enable operators to provide sustainable - and profitable - services to rural areas where ARPUs are less than US$2 a month.
VNL is the first and only company to have found a way of building commercial telephone networks for the three billion people (half the world's population) who live in rural areas not covered by a mobile network. Of this number, some 1.6 billion people have no electricity and another one billion live in areas with unreliable access to power.
Mr Mehrotra is a veteran of the telecoms industry and is named as one of the top 100 most influential people in the telecoms industry by Global Telecoms Business magazine. In December 2009 he was featured in Time magazine as one of "eight people who will change your life." He is the Founder and Chairman of the Shyam Group of companies in India which has interests in a wide range of successful telecom ventures, guided by his entrepreneurial vision. In 1974, as a young electronics engineer, he pioneered the manufacture of low cost satellite TV equipment that brought cable TV to millions of village homes in India.
In 2009, Mr Mehrotra was inducted on the Board of Sistema JSFC, Russia. In addition to his business responsibilities, he is active in promoting the interests of the Indian telecom industry and is currently the President of Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association of India (TEMA).
