The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest challenges the humankind has faced over the last 100 years, he said, noting that Vietnam and India can share many practical experiences and valuable lessons to jointly defeat this outbreak.
The Minister added with the wish to help India prevent the disease, the Vietnam-India Friendship Association has called on businesses in the information and communications sector to donate 100,000 antibacterial cloth masks to the Indian people. He also expressed his gratitude to the Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) and the Mobifone Corporation for their support of the mask, the Vietnam Post Corporation (VNPost) for supporting the transportation of these masks to India.
Offering thanks to the Vietnam-India Friendship Association, Ambassador Verma said the face masks will be distributed widely to the Indian people.
He also said the Vietnamese and Indian Prime Ministers held phone talks on April 13 during which they agreed that their agencies would keep in touch in the time ahead to coordinate the countries’ response measures against the pandemic and boost cooperation in other spheres of bilateral ties.
On the same day, Minister Nguyen Manh Hung had a meeting with Mr. Pranay Verma, Indian Ambassador to Vietnam. In the field of Information and Communications, India is working closely with Vietnamese partners and currently has many IT cooperation projects in Vietnam such as: Software Development Center in Ho Chi Minh City or Training Project for IT human resources in Hanoi.
India looks forward to strengthening cooperation with Vietnam in the field of IT, especially in the field of cybersecurity, e-government or human resources. The Indian government has just announced an US $ 1 billion credit package for digital connectivity and connectivity between India and ASEAN. India wants to receive specific proposals from the Ministry of Information and Communications as a state management agency on IT implementing.
Ambassador Pranay Verma also wants the Ministry of Information and Communications to share the experience of 5G development in Vietnam.
Regarding 5G development, Minister Nguyen Manh Hung said that by October this year Vietnam will officially commercialize 5G with Vietnamese equipment, both mobile phones and network equipment. Meanwhile, India is known as a software workshop of the world. Therefore, Minister Nguyen Manh Hung said he hopes IT businesses of the two countries will enhance collaboration in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and dealing with global issues like cyber security. The Ministry of Information and Communications has sent a dispatch to the Prime Minister which contained the strategic cooperation between Vietnam and India in the field of ICT in general and 5G development in particular. The Minister shared that, during the last anti-epidemic Covid-19, Vietnam has developed nearly 20 anti-epidemic applications. Vietnam's online applications have also grown tremendously, from e-learning to e-commerce.
The Minister believed that Vietnam and India could share experiences on the application of IT in the prevention of Covid-19 epidemic and work together to accelerate the process of national digital transformation in the coming time.
