India seeks chipset manufacturers to make its local GPS alternative fly further into the market
- India’s tech self-sufficiency drive has extended into satellite navigation, as the nation seeks manufacturers to help drive adoption of its own system.
- The nation already possesses an eight-satellite navigation constellation, named NavIC, that it touts as having superior coverage of its own territory and the local region.
- NavIC is also strategically significant, because India possesses medium-range missiles and needs celestial guidance if it were ever to use them in anger.
- The RFP seeks entities capable of making NavIC receivers at the rate of a million a year and hopes the contracts will help local industry to grow.
- NavIC includes a messaging system intended for use as a carrier of emergency information to ships at sea or other situations in which Indians are beyond the range of other networks


