Last week, ISRO acknowledged that the atomic clock aboard satellite IRNSS-1F had stopped working. Launched a decade ago, the spacecraft had already outlived two of its three onboard clocks. When the last one failed, it retired from navigation duty. A brief official statement noted that it would continue to transmit one-way messages. What went unsaid was the scale of the crisis this creates.
NavIC, India’s indigenous navigation system, now has just three satellites providing positioning, navigation, and timing services: IRNSS-1B, launched 12 years ago and already past its design life; IRNSS-1I, launched in 2018; and NVS-01, the sole second-generation satellite, launched in 2023. However, one needs at least four satellites at any given time to determine a precise location on the ground. With three, one can get a rough sense of where one is, but cannot navigate reliably or keep accurate time. The system has fallen below its minimum working threshold.
The challenges go much deeper. Replacement satellite NVS-02, launched in January 2025, failed to reach orbit after a propulsion fault stranded it. Two consecutive PSLV rocket failures in 2025 and early 2026 have compounded the backlog. A PIB statement from a Lok Sabha written reply on July 22, 2025, explicitly states: "NVS-03 is planned to be launched by the end of 2025. Subsequently, with a gap of six months, NVS-04 & NVS-05 are planned to be launched." However, for multiple reasons so far, no replacement effort has been successful. If IRNSS-1B, the oldest surviving member, fails next, India drops to two working navigation satellites and a system that is, for practical purposes, dead.
Why should ordinary citizens care? Because NavIC has quietly woven itself into daily Indian life. The transport ministry mandated NavIC-compatible tracking devices in every new commercial vehicle from 2019. Over a hundred companies manufacture these certified devices; millions of trucks and buses depend on them. Indian Railways has integrated NavIC across its locomotive fleet for safety monitoring. Fishermen along the coast use NavIC receivers to locate fishing zones and to identify their boundaries, beyond mobile coverage. The system is now used in precision agriculture and civil aviation, and is augmented by other systems for approach guidance, disaster warning, and telecommunications mapping.
This is precisely why the National Geospatial Policy 2022, one of the government’s most ambitious frameworks, matters here. It set time-bound goals that depend on a sovereign navigation backbone: high-resolution topographical mapping and an accurate digital elevation model by 2030, a national digital twin of India’s cities by 2035. The policy is tightly alligned with PM Gati Shakti, the platform that coordinates infrastructure planning across 16 ministries using real-time geospatial data. When the constellation feeding that data fails, it causes a ripple effect across the entire chain of projects. India’s geospatial economy, projected to be Rs 1 lakh crore in value, cannot deliver on that promise by relying on borrowed signals.
And borrowed they would be. Without a healthy NavIC, India falls back on American GPS, Europe’s Galileo, or Russia’s GLONASS, each controlled by a foreign authority. The Kargil lesson of 1999, when Washington refused to share GPS data during a conflict on Indian soil, was the very reason NavIC was conceived. This is not a hypothetical risk; it is a lived experience. China grasped this early. Its BeiDou constellation now fields over 50 operational satellites, provides sub-metre civilian accuracy, and has been adopted by more than 150 countries linked to the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing treats BeiDou as both a commercial product and a strategic instrument. India does not need that scale, but it certainly needs a system that works.
Japan offers a closer comparison. Its Quasi-Zenith Satellite System began with four satellites covering the Asia-Pacific region and supports precision agriculture, disaster response, and autonomous vehicles. Tokyo pursued this despite being a close American ally, recognising in its 2022 National Security Strategy that reliance on any single foreign navigation source is a vulnerability. If an ally of the United States sees reason to build its own system, India’s case is only stronger.
The path forward is not mysterious. ISRO must accelerate the launch of NVS-03, NVS-04, and NVS-05 with real urgency. Indigenous rubidium atomic clocks, already carried aboard NVS-01, must be scaled up so the country is no longer dependent on European suppliers for a component whose failure can ground an entire constellation. The National Geospatial Mission budget is much smaller than its ambition warrants; real sovereignty over geospatial data demands equal investment in the orbital systems that generate it.
NavIC today is not a system with one broken part. It is a structure that has lost a critical support, with another that could give way any day. Every month of delay is a month in which railway monitoring, fleet tracking, coastal fisheries, disaster warning, and the entire geospatial policy architecture operate on borrowed time and borrowed signals. India’s ambition to lead in geospatial technology cannot rest on foreign goodwill. It must rest on a sovereign top-notch navigation system.
(The author, Dr Y Nithiyanandam is a Professor and Head of the Geospatial Research Program at Takshashila Institution, and an expert in geospatial intelligence. The views are personal.)