• Recently, the Government of India unveiled the “Bharat 6G Vision Statement”.
• India is set to commit resources to the development of 6G technologies with the release of the vision document and the inauguration of a 6G test-bed for research & development (R&D). 

Why should India act early to roll out 6G?

• India will be the largest cellular market in the world in terms of both users and data consumption by 2030 and taking early steps could give India the leverage to mold 6G standards in advantageous ways.
• This would also help India to generate intellectual property (IP) that could make it a world leader as 6G evolves. 
• The early birds in the process of developing and involved in research and development of  every ‘G’ from ‘2G’ have received patents worth trillions.
• India has been late in terms of network roll-outs including 5G due to complex telecom policy and the resulting litigation and it has to ensure that doesn’t happen again with 6G.
• India possesses both an enormous domestic market and a large base of engineers who could contribute materially to R&D and setting standards. 
• Like every “G” iteration has led to enormous improvements in network performance, 6G promises that it will be 100 times faster than 5G and that would make barely imaginable applications possible. For example,
  • A 6G network could enable a host of autonomous cars to talk to one another in real time as they navigate crowded urban landscapes. 
  • Virtual reality without lags could become a reality.
• 6G aims to be more energy-efficient and better at using whatever spectrum is available for the network. 

India’s plan in this regard

• India will set up six technology-innovation groups to explore the possibilities and drive R&D into possible directions that 6G could go. 
• The groups will identify priority areas for research involving industry, academia, and service providers in this process. 
• The R&D would encompass all areas from mmWave and Terahertz communications, to fibre-broadband, remote operations, multi-sensor man-machine interfaces and devices leveraging edge cloud computing. 
• The policy will encompass ways to find the necessary resources to fund these ambitious R&D plans.

Conclusion

• Getting early into the 6G must be followed through with robust policy implementation. By creating IP and by contribution to global standards forums, India could become a world leader at 6G.