India seeks chipset manufacturers to make its local GPS alternative fly further into the market India’s tech self-sufficiency drive has extended into satellite navigation, as the nation seeks manufacturers to help drive adoption of its own system. The nation already possesses an eight-satellite navigation constellation, named NavIC, that it touts as having superior coverage of its own territory and the local region. …
May be the UK could throw in the towel again Galileo, One Web and support the Indian effort with investment. After all, about the only war the two nations seem to fight these days is on the Cricket pitch, and may be the occasional missile thrown into the pitch, but not involve missiles of the kind with warheads that require GPS guidance, so there should be no problem for each other with military use
Right now the government seems primarily focused on increasing NavIC adoption rather than spending on widening coverage area. The latest Qualcomm and Realtek SoCs support it. ISRO already has spectrum approval for a 24-satellite Global Indian Navigation System constellation, but has not yet funded it.
The Indian government has never showed any interest in codeveloping this system. As with many Indian dual use technologies, they developed this after being denied access to GPS in wartime. Adding someone else and their motives is just trouble. They already have the technology, the manufacturing prowess and the launch systems, and it’s just a question of future budget allocation. The whole system so far cost just over $300 million. They could get a full global system running for $2 billion.
"New Delhi wants to spur adoption of NavIC by having a local manufacturer make chipsets that can receive the satellites’ signals"
That seems unnecessarily complicated. It would be simpler to make NavIC support mandatory for anything with satellite navigation technology sold in India. Their market is big enough to matter.
(ISTR Russia doing something similar with GLONASS support.)
That is the fault of the article - it does not cover the topic in much detail beyond this narrow piece of news and doesn't convey the extent of policy initiatives that have been publicized. They are using both carrots and sticks here. It's been mentioned that phones sold after a certain point of time must support NavIC or the manufacturer risks being denied permission to sell, but they also want to encourage manufacture of chipsets locally.
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