In September, Reuters reported that the Indian government is pushing smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Oppo, Apple, and Xiaomi to make their smartphones compatible with Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), the home-grown alternative to US's Global Positioning System (GPS). A recent RTI response obtained by journalist Aroon Deep of Entrackr sheds more light on the government's efforts and the manufacturers' objections to the push, as well as the expected timeline. While Reuters reported that the government had asked the manufacturers to enable NavIC support starting January 2023, the RTI response suggests that this has been pushed to January 2025 based on the requests by industry stakeholders. Why does this matter: Other countries also have their own navigation systems similar to NavIC; the US has GPS, Russia has Glonass, Europe has Galileo, and China has BeiDou. It is important to have an independent navigation system given that foreign government-controlled navigation satellite systems are not guaranteed in hostile situations. But the push for NavIC-enabled handsets requires significant hardware changes and more time than the government looks to provide. More importantly, it might increase the costs of smartphones, which is undesirable in a country where more than half the population doesn't own a smartphone yet. The smartphone manufacturers have sought additional technical support from the government to mitigate some of the concerns. September 2 meeting between government and industry stakeholders: The RTI response consists of the Minutes of the Meeting held on September 2 between the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the…
