Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has decided to commercialize the NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation), India’s very own navigation system that was launched in 2016.
ISRO’s plans to implement the NavIC in smartphones contribute significantly to the Make in India initiative which was launched in September 2014 with the primary goal of making India a global manufacturing hub by promoting manufacturing of products within the country.
India currently makes use of GPS made and owned by America. India is all set to join the GPS global market and compete with players like GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (China) and Galileo (Europe).
A new chip that supports the NavIC needs to be developed in order to put the navigation system to use on smartphones. ISRO is reportedly engaging in discussions with chipmakers like Qualcomm and Broadcom to that end.
NavIC has been claimed by ISRO to have greater accuracy as compared to GPS, the reason being that NavIC works on dual-frequency bands (S and L) while Global Positioning System works only on the L band. ISRO NavIC can even boast of giving directions in a visual turn-by-turn manner when used in map applications.
Moreover, the Government of India has instructed all commercial vehicles registered after April 1, 2019, to be installed with the NavIC navigation system trackers.