India's own GPS

The commercial and military possibilities of ISRO's venture

The Indian Space Research Organisation or ISRO has successfully launched the second of the string of seven satellites that will comprise the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS). The IRNSS is supposed to start operating once four satellites are up, and it will be fully operational by 2015. IRNSS will provide geo-spatial coverage of India and its environs in a circle extending roughly about 1,500 km beyond the country's political borders. It will offer accurate all-weather signals for military use. ISRO intends to eventually scale up regional coverage to global by inducting more satellites. At a cost of Rs 1,400 crore, this is the cut-price equivalent of the US Navy's mega-billion-dollar 32-satellite Global Positioning System or GPS. IRNSS is also less ambitious than geo-spatial systems such as Russia's Glonass, Europe's Galileo, China's Beidou and the Japanese Quasi Zenith Satellite System. However, Galileo, Glonass and Beidou also scaled up from regional to global, and each had to solve technical problems on the way. ISRO will also have to teach itself on the job.

Reliable locational and velocity information is vital for many military applications and most of the world's geo-spatial systems have been developed for such purposes. Less accurate signals are provided to civilians. As of now, the IRNSS' average accuracy is less than that of GPS. But encrypted GPS military-quality signals are not available except to the US defence forces. Civilian GPS also cannot be depended upon for military purposes since it could be shut down at the whim of the US. India currently has limited use of Glonass for Russian gear, such as the Brahmos missiles and Sukhoi planes. IRNSS offers a reliable alternative for military applications. These include a wide range of tasks such as guiding infantry patrols in unfamiliar terrain, artillery target-tracking, drone and manned aircraft guidance and missile guidance. The availability for military applications in itself makes IRNSS worth building.

However, about 95 per cent of IRNSS usage is likely to be in the civilian domain and there's plenty of scope for commercial payoffs there. GPS usage is already common across India, so consumers don't need to be educated about this. Every smartphone includes default GPS and could quite easily also include IRNSS. The biggest single user may be the civil aviation industry. Location systems based on IRNSS can replace instrument landing systems (ILS). A satellite-based system like the GAGAN navigation system (which uses GPS, and could switch to IRNSS) can deliver positional accuracy to 1.5 metres for aircraft in flight. Unlike ILS, GAGAN need not be installed at every airport, which considerably reduces cost and lends itself to easy induction. Marine navigation and road guidance via IRNSS are also obvious areas with potential. Disaster management services have already been augmented with such aids. Municipal corporations track their fleets of water tankers (in Hyderabad) and buses (in Ahmedabad) by GPS. Other specialised tasks like mapping, surveying, seismic data capture, mining, phase vector management in electrical grids, road alignment calculations, and so on are common applications. Pilot projects have also used GPS to reconcile municipal records with actual structures on the ground.

As IRNSS scales up, ISRO will have to reorient itself to exploit its huge commercial potential. Apart from developing technical skills and capacities, ISRO would have to become more consumer-oriented and find ways to market data to both businesses and consumers. In fact, that may be ISRO's real challenge. For an inward-looking, technocratic public-sector organisation to start dealing with the exigencies of the market might be even more difficult than the technical challenges of building a challenger to GPS.