Terror of Dragon will not obstruct Aatmanirbhar Bharat
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is a much-loved governmental agency because it is a source of inspiration and pride, just like the Indian armed forces. Unlike NASA, which has an official China Exclusion Policy, ISRO does not have any. But given geopolitical circumstances, ISRO has seldom dealt with the Chinese space agencies and entities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now, when ISRO signed an agreement to offer the services of its satellite navigation-timing-positioning (SATNAV) system, the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), on Oppo's (a Chinese mobile phone company) handsets, all 'social media hell' broke loose. The questions being raised are: How can an unalloyed ISRO work with the CCP pariahs? Why should the much-loved ISRO collaborate with the CCP, that too after the 2020 Galwan Crisis? The sentiment largely behind these questions is genuinely heartfelt. But letting these questions go unanswered gives a broad scope for inimical elements to create disarray, and that need not happen.
This op-ed aims to simplify the complex and labyrinthine issue into understandable parts, thereby preventing chaotic interpretations that often arise from the innocent fondness for ISRO and social-media overthinking, without subjecting it to comprehensive scrutiny. I begin by acknowledging that the concerns regarding India's strategic agencies collaborating with CCP-backed pseudo-private companies are justified. But the reality that India is a work-in-progress in many technology domains and needs capable international partners cannot be omitted.
Modern SATNAVs - be it the US' Global Positioning System, Russia's GLONASS, China's Beidou, Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, or Europe's Galileo - are made for wide-ranging downstream commercial applications. They are unsaid cornerstones of the global digital economy. India's NavIC is no different, as it is meant for widespread use by governmental agencies, private industries, and ordinary individuals. Before NavIC came over the skies, ISRO began providing the GAGAN services to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for superior air-traffic management. The GAGAN system has been interoperable over the years, allowing overseas aircraft to use it seamlessly after entering Indian airspace. Since 2021, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has made GAGAN mandatory for all domestic aviation companies. Since 2018, the Indian Railways has been using NavIC for real-time tracking of trains, automatic warning at unmanned rail-track crossings, reporting of arrivals, departures, unscheduled stoppages, two-way emergency messaging (from trains to control station and vice versa), emergency
broadcasting from control stations, and SoS reporting. Now that the Indian government has made it mandatory for its agencies to use NavIC and sister space products, the next user base is, without a doubt, the enormous Indian market.
With GAGAN, ISRO had developed a foundational geospatial platform for raising an Indian equivalent of Google Maps or Google Earth. This effort bore fruit only this month.
In the third week of December 2021, MapmyIndia became India's first geospatial service provider startup to list its Initial Public Offering on the Indian stock market. The step is momentous. MapmyIndia has already identified using ISRO's NavIC, GAGAN, VEDAS (an online optical, microwave, thermal, hyperspectral EO data processing platform), and MOSDAC (another weather information, tropical water cycle, and oceanography data processing platform) for its various application programming interfaces. It is very likely that in the coming times, the delivery personnel bringing your food, shopping, and grocery orders or the maps your cab rider app offers will use this entirely Indian suite of products. Farmers, too, may begin to use such services for monitoring the health of their farms from their mobile handsets. They may use MapmyIndia along with Google Maps
and, of course, many similar Indian service providers. In 2021, India also came up with a draft National Geospatial Policy, which will eventually help commercialise such essential geospatial and SATNAV services of indigenous origins. The policy can stimulate a multi-million-dollar SATNAV and geospatial market in India.
ISRO's parent body, the Department of Space, is amply clear about the far-reaching structural reforms and goals of the long-duration projects it is pursuing. None of these projects is as spectacular as a Chandrayaan or a Mangalyaan. Still, they are crucial for securing national goals and uncharted strategic national interests.
Now, coming to Oppo. Not many would know that the most prominent mobile manufacturer supplying to India is the unassuming Guangdong-based BBK Electronics Corporation – the parent of not only Oppo, but Vivo, Realme, OnePlus, and iQOO. Now, following the Galwan Crisis, India has banned numerous mobile phone applications, and some quarters have begun expecting a similar ban on Chinese mobile phone companies. However, the naive sentiment for prohibition overlooks the severe economic consequences, not only from the global electronics and semiconductor sectors but also from the telecommunications, defence, health, governance, education, and other gargantuan businesses that depend on it. The US-South Korea-Taiwan triad is the world's largest semiconductor seller combined.
Among the top ten, the largest semiconductor buyers come from the US, China, Taiwan and South Korea. Of these ten, the four largest Chinese buyers of semiconductors are Huawei, Lenovo, BBK Electronics (Oppo's parent), and Xiaomi. India is now a fertile market for most of these players. For instance, BBK and Samsung have a mobile production plant in Noida, Taiwanese phone manufacturers Foxconn and Wistron are located near Chennai and Bengaluru. The labyrinthine semiconductor electronics become apparent when one realises Foxconn (a Taiwan-India venture) manufactures Chinese Xiaomi phones in India. The Indian market is well-entrenched. As a matter of fact, Chinese smartphone manufacturers constitute slightly more than 60% of the Indian smartphone market. Many of these cost-effective phones have played a central role in increasing per capita data use to 12 gigabytes per month and will continue to
play a role in raising the ceiling of India's digital economy.
The strength of the buyer-seller relation is quite evident in this global semiconductor business. And perturbing it is a long game. China played that long game by concentrating a large chunk of global electronics manufacturing in its backyard and exploiting the raw materials – rare-earth elements (REE) – geological riches. On the policy front, the State Council, the all-powerful CCP's governance arm, spared no effort to ramp up the production-to-consumption ratio of semiconductors. It gave domestic and foreign manufacturers leeway in determining the range of products and value chain stages with less intervention from the state. It generated profits only for firms that manufacture in their backyard. Those who opted out were meant to lose the market. It gave preferential tax treatment, land and monetary subsidies, labour and R&D incentives, and access to Chinese domestic equity funds. As a result, the four Chinese semiconductor buyers command an immense bargaining strength in the global market.
But, NavIC is no run-of-the-mill. It has been approved by the global telecom standards body, 3GPP. India's Department of Telecommunications is looking ahead to make all 4G+ enabled mobile phones sold in India compatible with NavIC services. The U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers Qualcomm and Broadcom, and their Taiwanese contemporary, Mediatek, are building NavIC-compatible chipsets. NavIC's services in the coming years will become central for mobile phones, automobile infotainment systems, our self-driving cars, drones, and Internet-of-Things devices in India and, if New Delhi is headstrong in its tech-diplomacy, even in other parts of Asia.
The US’s GPS has served industries across the globe, being the only functioning global SATNAV for a long time. However, that is not possible anymore. In 2011, not India, but the United Kingdom's Royal Academy of Engineering published a report warning of the dangerous dependencies of European nations – those were the pre-Brexit times – on the GPS. A similar European Commission study done around the same time predicted that almost 6-7% of the European Union's economic growth (roughly equivalent to US$1,100 billion) was dependent on the US's GPS. The report eventually called for Europe to build its own satellite navigation system, Galileo, which they have done.
India too cannot continue to overly depend on GPS or other overseas SATNAV services, and steps to inculcate NavIC-based services into our telecommunications are a must. SATNAVs are prone to natural hazards, human errors, space debris, or even deliberate anti-satellite attacks like any other space system. The US Space Force, established in 2019, is now in charge of the GPS, making the dependence on it even more vulnerable. Although the US is highly capable of securing its SATNAV, a crippled and over-dependent SATNAV can disrupt the global economy in dire scenarios. So, an independent SATNAV is needed for shielding from such cascading damages, and NavIC provides this much-needed bulwark to India and the entire region where its services can reach.
SATNAV is unlike any other commercial satellite. At its core are the 'atomic clocks' – an ultra-high-technology time-keeping physical device that only a few nations of the world can build. By avowing to build NavIC, India has expedited the' research and development of atomic clocks. And today, Indian laboratories in Bengaluru, Pune, New Delhi, and Hyderabad are undertaking R&D on next-generation atomic clocks – optical, quantum, and nuclear clocks. The R&D progress for such atomic clocks, eventual applications, and commercial return-on-investments depend on how NavIC is used today. NavIC is undoubtedly not a vanity project but a strategic project of significant global technopolitical and techno-economic consequences in the 21st century.
India may soon raise a few home-grown handset companies through our Production-Linked Incentive Schemes. With sustained effort, we are also a few years away from cultivating home-grown semiconductor companies that cater to market demands. Until then, we'll need the support of existing global players, and hence, the fearful slash-and-dash approach to Aatmanirbharta is not going to help. National security considers both strengths and weaknesses. We are an enormous newly-industrialised economy, with a sphere of influence penetrating the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Incongruously, we built a SATNAV system well before creating a high-end electronics and semiconductors manufacturing base. If the previous governments had fulfilled their duty to establish a solid foundation for electronics and semiconductor R&D and manufacturing, the situation today would be significantly different. Fortunately, we are working on various fronts on a war footing in preparation to usher our country into the Fourth Industrial Age. We will have to make the necessary socio-economic progress and sustain it, factoring in this labyrinth-like reality's advantages and threats. Remember Swami Vivekananda's immortal words, "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached."
The original piece was published in NewsBharati.
