India is on the moon now, so why is our satellite navigation system lagging behind? Yes! Rajeev Chandrashekar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, has announced that all of the 5G smartphone industry must be NavIC enabled even by the end of 2025.
The term NavIC here stands for Navigation with Indian Constellation. The government took the very first step on January 1, 2023, by authorizing NavIC support in all the smartphones sold in India. Now, another announcement is rolling out for further measures.
As mentioned, it has been announced that by the end of 2025, all smartphones must be NavIC enabled. Noticeably, this requirement stretches out to 5G smartphones by January 1, 2025, and all of the other mobile phones by December 2025. Chandrasekhar focuses attention on the government’s attentiveness to expanding NavIC adoption and says,
“Increasingly, we will make it mandatory as it is already in the automobile segment; we will make it almost mandatory that all the devices that use GPS use the NavIC chipsets.”
What Is Meant By NavIC
NavIC refers to Navigation with Indian Constellation, and it is the homegrown satellite navigation system of India and comparable to global systems such as BeiDou (BDS) and Galileo. NavIC was developed by the Indian Research Organization (ISRO). Also, it includes five satellites covering the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, China, and parts of Australia and Africa. It provides location tracking accuracy of up to 5 meters under ideal conditions and up to 10 meters under non-ideal conditions. India decided to stretch NavIC to 24 satellites to offer global coverage and higher accuracy, counting L1 and L5 bands.
For now, the use of NavIC is limited, and it is being used in regular public vehicle tracking in India. The next step for India is to enable it in smartphones. Whereas Apple recently included NavIC support in the select variants of its latest iPhone 15 lineup.
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