Terror of Dragon will not obstruct Aatmanirbhar Bharat
This op-ed attempts to evaluate the complex and labyrinth-like issue into understandable bits to prevent chaotic interpretations stemming from the innocent fondness for ISRO and social-media overthinking devoid of comprehensive scrutiny.
Science 24-Dec-2021
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The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is a much-loved governmental agency because it is a source of inspiration and pride, just like the Indian armed forces. Unlike NASA, which has an official China Exclusion Policy, ISRO does not have any. But given geopolitical circumstances, ISRO has seldom dealt with the Chinese space agencies and entities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now, when ISRO signed an agreement to offer the services of its satellite navigation-timing-positioning (SATNAV) system, the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), on Oppo's (a Chinese mobile phone company) handsets, all 'social media hell' broke loose. The questions being raised are - How can an unalloyed ISRO work with the CCP pariahs? Why should the much-loved ISRO collaborate with the CCP, that too after the 2020 Galwan Crisis? The sentiment largely behind these questions is genuinely heartfelt. But letting these questions go unanswered gives a broad scope for inimical elements to create disarray, and that need not happen. This op-ed attempts to evaluate the complex and labyrinth-like issue into understandable bits to prevent chaotic interpretations stemming from the innocent fondness for ISRO and social-media overthinking devoid of comprehensive scrutiny.
Modern SATNAVs - be it US' Global Positioning System, Russia's GLONASS, China's Beidou, Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, or Europe's Galileo - are made for wide-ranging downstream commercial applications. They are unsaid cornerstones of the global digital economy. India's NavIC is no different as it is meant for widespread use by governmental agencies, private industries, and ordinary individuals. Before NavIC came over the skies, ISRO began providing the GAGAN services to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for superior air-traffic management. The GAGAN system over the years has been interoperable such that overseas aircraft could use it seamlessly after entering Indian airspace. Since 2021, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has made GAGAN mandatory for all domestic aviation companies. Since 2018, the Indian Railways began using NavIC for real-time tracking of trains, automatic warning at un-manned rail-track crossings, reporting of arrivals, departures, unscheduled stoppages, two-way emergency messaging (from trains to control station and vice versa), emergency broadcasting from control stations, and SoS reporting. Now that the Indian government has made it mandatory for its agencies to use NavIC and sister space products, the next userbase is, without a doubt, the enormous Indian market.
With GAGAN, ISRO had developed a foundational geospatial platform for raising an Indian equivalent of Google Maps or Google Earth. This effort bore fruit only this month. In the third week of December 2021, MapmyIndia became India's first geospatial service provider startup to list its Initial Public Offering on the Indian stock market. The step is momentous. MapmyIndia has already identified using ISRO's NavIC, GAGAN, VEDAS (an online optical, microwave, thermal, hyperspectral EO data processing platform), MOSDAC (another weather information, tropical water cycle, and oceanography data processing platform) for its various application programming interfaces. It is very likely in the coming times, the delivery personnel bringing your food, shopping, and grocery orders or the maps your cab rider app offers will use this entirely Indian suite of products. Farmers too may begin to use such services for monitoring the health of their farms from their mobile handsets. They may use MapmyIndia along with Google Maps and, of course, many similar Indian service providers. In 2021, India also came up with a draft National Geospatial Policy which will eventually help commercialize such essential geospatial and SATNAV services of indigenous origins. The policy can stimulate a multi-million-dollar SATNAV and geospatial market in India.
ISRO's parent body, the Department of Space, is amply clear about the far-reaching structural reforms and goals of the long-duration projects it is pursuing. None of these projects are as spectacular as a Chandrayaan or a Mangalyaan. Still, they are crucial for securing national goals and uncharted strategic national interests.
Now coming to Oppo.
The US-South Korea-Taiwan triad is the world's largest semiconductor seller combined. Among the top ten, the largest semiconductor buyers come from the US, China, Taiwan and South Korea. Of these ten, the four largest Chinese buyers of semiconductors are Huawei, Lenovo, BBK Electronics (Oppo's parent), and Xiaomi. India now is a fertile market for most of these players. For instance, BBK and Samsung have a mobile production plant in Noida, Taiwanese phone manufacturers Foxconn and Wistron are located near Chennai and Bengaluru. The labyrinthous semiconductor-electronics becomes apparent when one realizes Foxconn (a Taiwan-India venture) manufactures Chinese Xiaomi phones in India. The Indian market is well-entrenched. As a matter of fact, Chinese smartphone manufacturers constitute slightly more than 60% of the Indian smartphone market. Many of these cost-effective phones have played a central role in increasing per capita data use to 12 gigabytes per month and will continue to play a role in raising the ceiling of India's digital economy.
The strength of the buyer-seller relation is quite evident in this global semiconductor business. And perturbing it is a long game. China played that long game by concentrating a large chunk of global electronics manufacturing in its backyard and exploiting the raw materials – rare-earth-elements (REE) – geological riches. On the policy front, the State Council, the all-powerful CCP's governance arm, spared no effort to ramp up the production-to-consumption ratio of semiconductors. It gave domestic and foreign manufacturers leeway in determining the range of products and value chain stages with less intervention from the state. It made profits come to only those firms that manufacture in their backyard. Those who opted out were meant to lose the market. It gave preferential tax treatment, land and monetary subsidies, labor and R&D incentives, and Chinese domestic equity funds access. As a result, the four Chinese semiconductor buyers command an immense bargaining strength in the global market.
But, NavIC is no run of the mill. It has been approved by the global telecom standards body - 3GPP. India's Department of Telecommunications is looking ahead to make all 4G+ enabled mobile phones sold in India compatible with NavIC services. The U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers Qualcomm and Broadcom, and their Taiwanese contemporary, Mediatek, are building NavIC compatible chipsets. NavIC's services in the coming years will become central for mobile phones, automobile infotainment systems, our self-driving cars, drones, and Internet-of-Things devices in India and, if New Delhi is headstrong in its tech-diplomacy, even in other parts of Asia.
The US’ GPS has served industries across the globe, being the only functioning global SATNAV for a long time. However, that is not possible anymore. In 2011, not India, but the United Kingdom's Royal Academy of Engineering published a report warning the dangerous dependencies of European nations – those were the pre-Brexit times – on the GPS. A similar European Commission study done around the same time predicted, almost 6-7% of the European Union's economic growth (roughly equivalent to US$ 1,100 billion) was dependent on US' GPS. The report eventually called for Europe to build its own SATNAV, Galileo, which they have done.
India too cannot continue to overly depend on GPS or other overseas SATNAV services, and steps to inculcate NavIC-based services into our telecommunications are a must. SATNAVs are prone to natural hazards, human errors, space debris, or even deliberate anti-satellite attacks like any other space system. The US Space Force, established in 2019, is now in charge of the GPS, making the dependence on it even more vulnerable. Although the US is highly capable of securing its SATNAV, a crippled and over-depended SATNAV can disrupt the global economy in dire scenarios. So, an independent SATNAV is needed for shielding from such cascading damages, and NavIC provides this much-needed bulwark to India and the entire region where its services can reach.
SATNAV is unlike any other commercial satellite. At its core are the 'atomic clocks' – an ultra-high-technology time-keeping physical device that only a few nations of the world can build. By avowing to build NavIC, India has expedited making atomic clocks' research and development. And today, Indian laboratories in Bengaluru, Pune, New Delhi, Hyderabad are undertaking R&D on next-generation atomic clocks – optical, quantum, and nuclear clocks. The R&D progress for such atomic clocks, eventual applications, and commercial return-on-investments depend on how NavIC is used today. NavIC is undoubtedly not a vanity project but a strategic project of significant global technopolitical and techno-economic consequences in the 21st century.
India may soon raise a few home-grown handset companies through our Production-Linked Incentive Schemes. If there is sustained effort, we are also a few years away from cultivating home-grown semiconductor companies catering to the market demands. Until then, we'll need the support of existing global players, and hence the fearful slash-and-dash approach to Aatmanirbharta is not going to help. National security considers both strengths and weaknesses. We are an enormous newly-industrialized economy, with a sphere of influence penetrating the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Incongruously, we built a SATNAV system well before creating a high-end electronics and semiconductors manufacturing base. Had the previous governments done their duty of laying solid foundations for electronics and semiconductor R&D and manufacturing, things would have been much different today. Fortunately, we are working on various fronts on a war-footing in preparation to usher our country into the Fourth Industrial Age. We will have to make the necessary socio-economic progress and sustain it factoring in this labyrinth-like reality's advantages and threats.
Remember Swami Vivekananda's immortal words, "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached."
I start with the submission that the concerns of India's strategic agencies liaising with CCP-supported backed pseudo-private companies are justifiable. But, the reality that India is a work-in-progress in many technology domains and needs capable international partners cannot be omitted.
Modern SATNAVs - be it US' Global Positioning System, Russia's GLONASS, China's Beidou, Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, or Europe's Galileo - are made for wide-ranging downstream commercial applications. They are unsaid cornerstones of the global digital economy. India's NavIC is no different as it is meant for widespread use by governmental agencies, private industries, and ordinary individuals. Before NavIC came over the skies, ISRO began providing the GAGAN services to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for superior air-traffic management. The GAGAN system over the years has been interoperable such that overseas aircraft could use it seamlessly after entering Indian airspace. Since 2021, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has made GAGAN mandatory for all domestic aviation companies. Since 2018, the Indian Railways began using NavIC for real-time tracking of trains, automatic warning at un-manned rail-track crossings, reporting of arrivals, departures, unscheduled stoppages, two-way emergency messaging (from trains to control station and vice versa), emergency broadcasting from control stations, and SoS reporting. Now that the Indian government has made it mandatory for its agencies to use NavIC and sister space products, the next userbase is, without a doubt, the enormous Indian market.
With GAGAN, ISRO had developed a foundational geospatial platform for raising an Indian equivalent of Google Maps or Google Earth. This effort bore fruit only this month. In the third week of December 2021, MapmyIndia became India's first geospatial service provider startup to list its Initial Public Offering on the Indian stock market. The step is momentous. MapmyIndia has already identified using ISRO's NavIC, GAGAN, VEDAS (an online optical, microwave, thermal, hyperspectral EO data processing platform), MOSDAC (another weather information, tropical water cycle, and oceanography data processing platform) for its various application programming interfaces. It is very likely in the coming times, the delivery personnel bringing your food, shopping, and grocery orders or the maps your cab rider app offers will use this entirely Indian suite of products. Farmers too may begin to use such services for monitoring the health of their farms from their mobile handsets. They may use MapmyIndia along with Google Maps and, of course, many similar Indian service providers. In 2021, India also came up with a draft National Geospatial Policy which will eventually help commercialize such essential geospatial and SATNAV services of indigenous origins. The policy can stimulate a multi-million-dollar SATNAV and geospatial market in India.
ISRO's parent body, the Department of Space, is amply clear about the far-reaching structural reforms and goals of the long-duration projects it is pursuing. None of these projects are as spectacular as a Chandrayaan or a Mangalyaan. Still, they are crucial for securing national goals and uncharted strategic national interests.
Now coming to Oppo.
Not many would know that the most prominent mobile manufacturer supplying to India is the unassuming Guangdong-based BBK Electronics Corporation – the parent of not only Oppo, but Vivo, Realme, OnePlus, and iQOO. Now post-Galwan Crisis, India did ban numerous mobile phone applications, and some quarters began expecting a similar ban on Chinese mobile phone companies. However, the naive sentiment for prohibition doesn't factor in the severe economic consequences not only from the global electronics and semiconductor sectors but also the telecommunications, defence, health, governance, education, and other gargantuan businesses depending on it.
The US-South Korea-Taiwan triad is the world's largest semiconductor seller combined. Among the top ten, the largest semiconductor buyers come from the US, China, Taiwan and South Korea. Of these ten, the four largest Chinese buyers of semiconductors are Huawei, Lenovo, BBK Electronics (Oppo's parent), and Xiaomi. India now is a fertile market for most of these players. For instance, BBK and Samsung have a mobile production plant in Noida, Taiwanese phone manufacturers Foxconn and Wistron are located near Chennai and Bengaluru. The labyrinthous semiconductor-electronics becomes apparent when one realizes Foxconn (a Taiwan-India venture) manufactures Chinese Xiaomi phones in India. The Indian market is well-entrenched. As a matter of fact, Chinese smartphone manufacturers constitute slightly more than 60% of the Indian smartphone market. Many of these cost-effective phones have played a central role in increasing per capita data use to 12 gigabytes per month and will continue to play a role in raising the ceiling of India's digital economy.
The strength of the buyer-seller relation is quite evident in this global semiconductor business. And perturbing it is a long game. China played that long game by concentrating a large chunk of global electronics manufacturing in its backyard and exploiting the raw materials – rare-earth-elements (REE) – geological riches. On the policy front, the State Council, the all-powerful CCP's governance arm, spared no effort to ramp up the production-to-consumption ratio of semiconductors. It gave domestic and foreign manufacturers leeway in determining the range of products and value chain stages with less intervention from the state. It made profits come to only those firms that manufacture in their backyard. Those who opted out were meant to lose the market. It gave preferential tax treatment, land and monetary subsidies, labor and R&D incentives, and Chinese domestic equity funds access. As a result, the four Chinese semiconductor buyers command an immense bargaining strength in the global market.
But, NavIC is no run of the mill. It has been approved by the global telecom standards body - 3GPP. India's Department of Telecommunications is looking ahead to make all 4G+ enabled mobile phones sold in India compatible with NavIC services. The U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers Qualcomm and Broadcom, and their Taiwanese contemporary, Mediatek, are building NavIC compatible chipsets. NavIC's services in the coming years will become central for mobile phones, automobile infotainment systems, our self-driving cars, drones, and Internet-of-Things devices in India and, if New Delhi is headstrong in its tech-diplomacy, even in other parts of Asia.
The US’ GPS has served industries across the globe, being the only functioning global SATNAV for a long time. However, that is not possible anymore. In 2011, not India, but the United Kingdom's Royal Academy of Engineering published a report warning the dangerous dependencies of European nations – those were the pre-Brexit times – on the GPS. A similar European Commission study done around the same time predicted, almost 6-7% of the European Union's economic growth (roughly equivalent to US$ 1,100 billion) was dependent on US' GPS. The report eventually called for Europe to build its own SATNAV, Galileo, which they have done.
India too cannot continue to overly depend on GPS or other overseas SATNAV services, and steps to inculcate NavIC-based services into our telecommunications are a must. SATNAVs are prone to natural hazards, human errors, space debris, or even deliberate anti-satellite attacks like any other space system. The US Space Force, established in 2019, is now in charge of the GPS, making the dependence on it even more vulnerable. Although the US is highly capable of securing its SATNAV, a crippled and over-depended SATNAV can disrupt the global economy in dire scenarios. So, an independent SATNAV is needed for shielding from such cascading damages, and NavIC provides this much-needed bulwark to India and the entire region where its services can reach.
SATNAV is unlike any other commercial satellite. At its core are the 'atomic clocks' – an ultra-high-technology time-keeping physical device that only a few nations of the world can build. By avowing to build NavIC, India has expedited making atomic clocks' research and development. And today, Indian laboratories in Bengaluru, Pune, New Delhi, Hyderabad are undertaking R&D on next-generation atomic clocks – optical, quantum, and nuclear clocks. The R&D progress for such atomic clocks, eventual applications, and commercial return-on-investments depend on how NavIC is used today. NavIC is undoubtedly not a vanity project but a strategic project of significant global technopolitical and techno-economic consequences in the 21st century.
India may soon raise a few home-grown handset companies through our Production-Linked Incentive Schemes. If there is sustained effort, we are also a few years away from cultivating home-grown semiconductor companies catering to the market demands. Until then, we'll need the support of existing global players, and hence the fearful slash-and-dash approach to Aatmanirbharta is not going to help. National security considers both strengths and weaknesses. We are an enormous newly-industrialized economy, with a sphere of influence penetrating the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Incongruously, we built a SATNAV system well before creating a high-end electronics and semiconductors manufacturing base. Had the previous governments done their duty of laying solid foundations for electronics and semiconductor R&D and manufacturing, things would have been much different today. Fortunately, we are working on various fronts on a war-footing in preparation to usher our country into the Fourth Industrial Age. We will have to make the necessary socio-economic progress and sustain it factoring in this labyrinth-like reality's advantages and threats.
Remember Swami Vivekananda's immortal words, "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached."