5G / 6G

Story hook

On 1 October 2022, on the opening day of the 6th India Mobile Congress in Delhi's Pragati Maidan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a small black phone, made a video call to a teacher in a classroom 600 km away, and declared that India had just become the third country to deploy 5G commercially — only 13 months after South Korea and the US first switched on a public 5G network. Behind the demo was a piece of equipment most of the audience didn't notice: the gNodeB radio built by a Bengaluru startup called Tejas Networks, running software from a Chennai company called WiSig — both of them subsidiaries of the Tata group, both of them parts of the indigenous 5Gi / 5G NR telecom stack developed under TSDSI.

For a country that imported 90 % of its 4G equipment from Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, building a homegrown 5G stack was a strategic imperative — and a hedge. India's June 2020 ban on Chinese applications, the 2020 Trust Directive that quietly excluded Huawei and ZTE from Indian networks, the parallel 5Gi standard contributed to the ITU, and the Bharat 6G Alliance launched in 2023 — all are pieces of the same play: own the network, then own what runs on it.

Why this matters for UPSC

5G and indigenous telecom are the third-most-asked S&T topic after space and biotech. Prelims questions on spectrum auctions (700, 3500, 26 GHz), on TSDSI's 5Gi contribution to ITU, and on the Bharat 6G Vision are now standard. Mains stems probe network sovereignty, dual-use trust, and the link to Make in India / PLI. Interview boards regularly ask about Huawei, BSNL revival and 5G use cases.