India’s 6G Dreams: Between Technonationalism and Technological Readiness

                                 

From 5G Lag to 6G Leadership: Reality Check

India officially launched 5G in October 2022, a full three years behind South Korea — the global pioneer. By then, over 70 countries had already rolled out 5G across thousands of cities. India’s delayed entry was not due to a lack of ambition, but due to policy muddles, infrastructure bottlenecks, and a lack of coherent strategy.

Now, as the global race for 6G begins — with early movers like China, South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. already establishing standards with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — India claims it will set the rules for 6G.

But is ambition alone enough?

China Sets the Pace While India Counts Patents

While India is busy crafting slogans, China has already secured three crucial 6G technical standards with ITU. These are not just symbolic wins — they are rule-setting milestones. Whoever defines these standards will dictate the design, interoperability, and market leadership of 6G for the next decade.

India, meanwhile, has focused heavily on patent numbers. In 2023–24, India granted over 1 lakh patents, a nearly threefold increase. But how many of these patents are truly impactful? What innovations have we led in 6G communication, quantum networks, or advanced antenna technologies?

There’s no official audit of quality, no strategic analysis of sector-wise breakthroughs. It’s quantity over quality, and the obsession with numbers seems to be clouding policy clarity.

The Bharat 6G Alliance: Hope or Hype?

The Bharat 6G Alliance, a consortium of private players, IITs, and researchers, aims to contribute 10% of global 6G patents. While the target sounds impressive, no roadmap has been publicly disclosed explaining how this will be achieved.

• Do we have experts of the stature of Hu Honglin (China Telecom, SARI)?

• Do we have globally respected telecom R&D centers with deep tech capacity?

• Is our IP (intellectual property) ecosystem robust enough to defend and commercialize 6G innovations?

Until these questions are addressed, India’s claims risk being dismissed as technonationalist bravado.

Al-Biruni and the Ancient Echoes of Scientific Arrogance

This nationalistic overconfidence isn’t new. As far back as the 11th century, Al-Biruni, the Persian polymath who studied Indian sciences deeply, warned against such self-congratulatory attitudes.

In Kitab al-Hind, Al-Biruni noted that Indians believed their nation to be the sole source of wisdom and science. He wrote:

“Folly is an illness for which there is no medicine… The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs…”

His critique wasn’t cultural but scientific. Indian scholars of that era, he observed, were often unwilling to challenge the crowd, lacking the spirit of Socratic inquiry that elevated Greek science.

Has much changed in the past 1,000 years?

Patents ≠ Innovation

There’s a dangerous conflation in India’s current science policy — patents are seen as innovation, but the two are not always equivalent. Patents can be filed on incremental changes or defensive technologies. True innovation involves:

• Solving real-world problems

• Creating global value chains

• Setting standards

• Disrupting existing models

India’s 6G push needs to move beyond the patent parade and invest in deep, original science — in hardware, semiconductors, signal processing, AI-led networks, and low-orbit satellite integration.

What India Needs to Lead in 6G

To truly lead — not just proclaim leadership — India must:

1. Invest massively in telecom R&D, beyond IITs and into private enterprise labs.

2. Engage early and deeply with ITU, contributing not just attendance but technical papers and prototypes.

3. Foster a start-up ecosystem focused on core hardware, not just apps.

4. Build sovereign capability in semiconductors and advanced antenna design.

5. Move from imitation to imagination, as Abdul Kalam once envisioned.

Final Thought: Humility is the First Step to Leadership

India’s ambition to lead in 6G is admirable. But leadership will not be earned through declarations — it will come from innovation, collaboration, and humility. As Al-Biruni rightly implied, arrogance without inquiry breeds decay, not development.

Let India dream — but let it also do the hard work.