Born out of bitter Kargil lesson, NavIC was India’s answer to GPS. Why it’s still struggling to take off

NavIC was born out of a bitter lesson learnt during the 1999 Kargil War. Built by ISRO at cost of $525 million, only four of its 11 satellites are functional.

Illustration: Shruti Naithani | ThePrint

New Delhi: India’s satellite navigation system, the answer to US’ GPS network, was built at a cost of $525 million with the aim of weaning the country from dependence on foreign powers. It was a bitter lesson learned during the Kargil War in 1999. But, nearly 26 years after it was conceived, India is still struggling to bring a functional version of Navigation with Indian Constellation or NavIC to the market.

Only four of 11 NavIC satellites are currently in use with the capability to provide position, navigation and timing services, Union Minister for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh told the Lok Sabha last month. The remaining four are being used for one-way message broadcast, one has been decommissioned, and two could not reach their intended orbit.

Developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the navigation system appears to be slipping from its initial promise. It had become imperative for India to invest in the technology back in 1999, when its request to access GPS data for enemy locations in the Kargil region was denied. The incident prompted the government to press for a strategically designed home-grown navigation system.

But since then, something or the other has been going wrong for India’s NavIC which is yet to be fully functional regionally. “Too much is riding on it and we cannot abandon it,” Ajey Lele, deputy director general at Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), told ThePrint.

Adding, “We initially faced issues with the atomic clocks from Europe, after which India started making its own atomic clocks. Then we faced issues with ground equipment. And finally, we recently had a failed mission where the satellite could not be placed in orbit. Things have been going wrong, but we cannot give up.”

Currently, at least five countries have their own fully operational navigation systems—US’ GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, European Union’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou and Japan’s QZSS.

“NavIC will be crucial in advancing India’s defence capabilities, identifying enemy locations up to 1,500 km radius around India’s borders,” former ISRO chief A.S. Kiran Kumar told ThePrint. He was at the helm when the space agency was shaping the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), whose next generation series is known as NavIC.

“The service covers the entire Indian region and also the region extending up to 1,500 km around India on dual frequencies in L5 and S bands,” a senior ISRO scientist said. L5 and S bands are radiofrequency bands used in satellite navigation communication. Such precision will help ensure accuracy of more than 20 metres in any weather condition.

Setbacks and revival plans

With IRNSS, the plan was to first develop the system on a regional scale that would operate only within and till a certain radius around the country’s boundary. The NavIC now is meant to be operational within and up to 1,500 km radius of India but is envisioned to be a global satellite navigation system in the future, on par with GPS, Galileo and BeiDou.

The first satellite (IRNSS 1A) was sent up on 1 July, 2013. In the following missions, IRNSS 1B, 1C, ID, IE, 1F, 1G, 1H, 1I, 1J, and 1K were launched.

Speaking to ThePrint, a senior ISRO scientist said that currently, 1B, 1F, 1I and 1J satellites are fully operational. 1C is partially functional. “From the next generation navigation satellites, which come under the NVS series, 1J is operational. 1K, now known as NVS-02 (launched this year), was not successful,” he said.

NavIC faced one of its biggest setbacks earlier this year with the “partial failure” of the NVS-02 mission.

Early this year, ISRO launched the mission (also incidentally the 100th mission by the space agency) from Sriharikota to place the second navigation satellite under the NavIC series into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. But it could not be placed successfully.

This was not the first hurdle for India’s navigation satellite ambitions. In 2016, Kiran Kumar had announced that atomic clocks on IRNSS 1A had become dysfunctional. He, however, said that this did not have an impact on the overall functioning of the navigation system.

At the time, the space agency stressed that the remaining six satellites in orbit were functional, but admitted that some hardware issues had been detected in the rubidium atomic clocks in some of them.

Unfortunately, IRNSS 1H satellite, launched on 31 August, 2017, to replace 1A, could also not be inserted into the desired orbit. According to ISRO, a heat shield, which protects the satellite, could not be detached on time during the launch.

ISRO is now banking on a series of planned missions to resuscitate NavIC. These include placement of the next set of satellites, NVS-03, NVS-04 and NVS-05, in space to boost the navigation network and bridge the gap set by the current non-functional ones.

“NVS-03 is planned to be launched by the end of 2025. Subsequently, with a gap of six months, NVS-04 and NVS-05 will be launched,” Jitendra Singh said in his Lok Sabha response.

ISRO chairperson, V. Narayanan, told ThePrint last week that NVS-03 and NVS-04 are likely to take flight by the end of this year, and NVS-05 would likely launch in 2026. “No mission is foolproof. There is always some chance of failure. NavIC is functional, but we will improve its functioning with more satellites in the coming years,” he said.

NavIC-compatible phones

In 2022, the government had directed major phone manufacturers to design NavIC-compatible phones for India, but there was major pushback from the industry.

The government said that by 1 January, 2023, all phone models for release in India should support NavIC, stressing that the deadline was not “hard and fast”.

Phone companies said that their production costs would surge significantly with this directive. However, between 2023 and 2025, new models of the most popular phones, such as those released by Apple, Oppo, Xiaomi, OnePlus, etc, are NavIC compatible.

The government has since issued repeated directives to mobile phone manufacturers to make devices compatible with NavIC.

NavIC’s potential does not stop with a civilian navigation system or for defence and security purposes. For civilian use, NavIC will be able to do anything that a GPS or GLONASS can, according to its mission document.

Once NavIC is fully functional, anyone with a phone designed for India, within 1,500 km radius of the Indian border, would be able to access the navigation system.

“A lot of the newer phone models are already compatible with NavIC. It is currently developed as a regional navigation system, but we will be able to expand it as a global system as we get more satellites up,” Kumar told ThePrint.

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)