There is a moment in every great infrastructure story where the ambition meets architecture. For India, that moment arrived not with fanfare but quietly somewhere between the day we lit up our one lakh indigenous 4G towers and the morning Indian Prime Minister released Bharat 6G Vision document in March 2023, outlining a future where India would not merely adopt global telecom standards, but help write them. I have witnessed this evolution – from the days where PCO/STD booths were known as connectivity infrastructure to an era where we are debating terahertz spectrum and AI-native radio access networks. What is unfolding today is not an upgrade, it is a reinvention.
India’s telecom history tells us that we were late to the table. India watched 2G emerge in Europe, 3G mature in Japan, and 4G took shape in USA, before we scrambled to deploy each in turn. But that pattern ended with 5G. India today boasts world’s second largest 5G subscriber-base with over 400 million users, marking one of the fastest roll outs of the technology globally. This achievement was not accidental. It was the product of deliberate policy, competitive spectrum auction, and an industry that finally aligned around shared ambition.
Now, with 6G, India refused to wait for its turn.
Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia announced India’s ambitious target of contributing 10% of global patents to future 6G standards – a target that, frankly, would have seemed absurd a decade ago. What makes it incredible today is the machinery behind it. Department of Telecommunication of India sanctioned Rs. 271 Crores for 104 projects for 6G under the Telecom Technology Development Fund to support indigenous innovation and Bharat 6G alliance. The alliance now comprises over 80 member organizations including 30+ startups.
What matters most in this equation is neither money nor patents – it is the mindset shift and the shift is generational. India is moving beyond being just a consumer of technology to becoming a co-creator and co-leader in the 6G revolution. When you have the IITs, startups, and public sector research institutes working alongside global alliances on the architecture of networks that will define 2030 and beyond, you are not building a roadmap – you are building a legacy.
Apart from the set target, there is a much-debated topic that is whether a terrestrial network can ever truly connect the rural India. My opinion, here, is – not alone; and not fast enough.
As per PIB release in September 2025, India had ~1,003 million internet subscribers as of April-June 2025. Yet, rural internet penetration remained about 46 subscribers per 100 people, a chasm that fibre cables, mobile towers struggle to bridge in tribal belts, island territories, and Himalayan corridors. This is precisely where the satellite technology ceases to be a supplementary technology and becomes a mission-critical infrastructure. Targeted reforms in the space sector have paved the way for private sector participation, enabling companies like Starlink, Jio Satellite Communications, and OneWeb India to provide satellite internet services. Maharashtra became the first Indian state to partner with Starlink for satellite-based internet services with deployment planned across underserved districts including Gadchiroli, Nandurbar, Washim – the names that never appeared in technology news but represent millions of Indians for whom connectivity has historically been a promise, not a reality.
What excites me the most is not the headlines but the convergence model that is currently in play. India is running BharatNet fibre to Panchayats, deploying 5G in urban corridors, and seeding LEO satellite connectivity in the gaps. Hybrid connectivity model, integrating satellite broadband with terrestrial networks is no longer an experimental proposal, rather a reality today. These layers working together forms what I call a “connectivity stack” – that is reliable, resilient, and inclusive. Irrespective of the novel implementation at place, affordability is still a concern for many rural users, risking exclusion of low-income communities without subsidies or scale. An essential tool of revival would be to deploy shared infrastructure financing, backed by strong Government interventions among other options – if the last mile is not to become the lost mile.
Although multiple great initiatives are in-progress, but I doubt whether those will bring the most transformative changes in telecom over the next decade. I believe, in the 6G race, the transformative changes are not going to be visible to consumers as it will be brought by the “Invisible Intelligence” – getting applied deep inside the network, in the logical layers, algorithms, and architecture.
Yes, the invisible intelligence is the AI. The upcoming 6G is being designed to be AI-native by having AI built into their architecture from inception, co-locating AI capabilities with radio access network functions. This is going be a profound shift from how the networks have been built historically as we will move from networks that carry data to networks that understand it and the implication for India is immense. Today, network automation has overtaken the customer experience as the leading use case for AI investment in telecom, signalling a bold step towards autonomous networks – an AI-driven self-managing system that can self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize with minimal human intervention. For a country with scale and complex geographic diversities, AI-enablement is not luxury, but operational necessity. Edge computing completes the picture by integrating solar PV systems and battery storage at base stations and radio access network nodes – enabling on-site renewable power, while localised edge processing cuts the energy-intensive backhaul of data to centralised facilities. The future network, in my view, is going to be a distributed smart network system where intelligence lives at the edge, decisions happen in milliseconds, and the network itself learns.
Now, having celebrated the progress, let me also turn to the friction points – because no credible industry voice should offer only optimism. If I were to handpick only three concerns that India cannot afford to ignore, those will be as follows:
First, the spectrum challenge. 6G will require terahertz band – frequencies that offer extraordinary bandwidth but comes with a real propagation challenge. Regulatory frameworks for such band must be developed now and not in 2029. Second, the talent gap. Designing an AI-native network requires a workforce that sits at the intersection of telecom engineering, software development and machine learning – a profile, that I believe, is not yet getting produced at scale in our current educational pipeline. And last, the challenge of inter-ministerial coordination. Because securing the right of way for renewable infrastructure development is often slow, complex and largely inconsistent – and yet the coordination among telecom, power, and environment ministries remain sub-optimal. India’s ambition for green, distributed, AI-powered networks will be throttled unless the governance catches up the pace of technology evolution.
What the industry leaders and policymakers must do together is move from pilot projects to policy defaults – standardizing the O-RAN deployments, mandating open interfaces, and creating regulatory sandboxes that will allow innovation to move at the speed that technology demands.
The final question, and in many ways, the hardest one is whether we can build all of these without burning down our future. While 5G networks are estimated to be 90% more energy efficient per data bit than 4G, the sheer increase in network density and traffic volumes is expected to offset the gain. This is a paradox that every telecom operator in India must confront. We cannot grow and be green, simply by switching to more efficient hardware. The answer to the question lies in software-defined network management, renewable energy integration at tower sites, and AI-driven load optimization mechanism that dynamically powers down underutilized nodes.
India’s telecom reinvention must be built with a carbon budget in mind. The operators who will lead 2030 are not just those with broader coverage or lowest latency – they will be the ones who could prove that connectivity and sustainability are not competing values, but complementary ones.
I have seen the era when a phone call used to be an event. Today, a child in a remote school in Gadchiroli, for the first time, can attend a virtual class over satellite connection. Tomorrow, the same child may access AI-powered personalized education over a 6G network that could anticipate the child’s learning needs before the child could articulate. This is not hyperbole. It is the arc of transformation – and India, for perhaps the first time in its telecom history, is writing the story rather than reading it. The reinvention has begun. The question is not whether India can do this – rather, whether we have the discipline, governance and the collective will to see it through.
