Somewhere off the coast of Tamil Nadu, a mechanised fishing trawler loses its mobile signal within just 12-15 kilometers from the shore, making it impossible for the crew to receive a cyclone warning or call for help for an engine failure. This is fairly routine for nearly 250,000 fishing boats that operate along India’s 7,500-km coastline.

Or another familiar scenario, this time in the hills, where a BharatNet fibre cable in Assam gets cut by a landslide. The mean time to fix a rural fibre fault in India is 17 days. While India has invested nearly ₹400 billion for fibre connectivity for rural areas through BharatNet, only a third of the gram panchayats connected under the programme are actually operational.

These are the real people that should be at the heart of India’s satellite internet debate but the media coverage is silent on this.

The Real Issues
The public conversation about Starlink in India has been consumed by a single question: should Elon Musk’s company be allowed to operate here? It is a dramatic but misleading question. The real question to ask is: why does India need satellite broadband, and for whom?

Over 631,000 Indian villages, out of a total of 644,000, already have 4G coverage. The coverage gap therefore, of about 10,000 villages without any mobile network, is quite narrow. But a closer look reveals a larger usage gap. Rural internet density (internet subscriptions per 100 population) is 48 per 100 people as against 127 in urban India, for reasons like handset costs, digital literacy, relevance. Satellite broadband, if priced anywhere near current global benchmarks, will not solve any of these problems. In Bangladesh, Starlink costs ₹3,295 a month plus ₹34,000 for the hardware, about sixteen times what an Indian mobile user pays monthly.

So what’s the significance and who needs it?

The need is both real and narrow. Fishing boats and merchant vessels operating beyond mobile range, where legacy satellite providers like Hughes Communications India, Tata Communications VSAT, and Inmarsat currently charge over $100 per gigabyte through older geostationary satellite systems. Remote industrial sites, mines, and offshore platforms, where enterprise VSAT can cost upto ₹125,000 a month for sub-megabit speeds. Disaster zones, where the current backup is limited to voice-only satellite phones at district level. And those last 10,000 villages, mostly located in terrain where fibre keeps breaking.

For these users, the economics of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite could be a step change. Starlink’s commercial maritime plan delivers a terabyte for about ₹96,000, a per-gigabyte rate about a hundred times lower than what legacy geostationary providers charge. The mechanised fleet (over 64,000 vessels) and merchant shipping would find this way more affordable. Of course, it would still remain unaffordable for artisanal fishers operating smaller boats without a subsidy program, which is what many countries like South Korea and UK have done.

In mid-2026, ISRO launched Nabhmitra, a satellite-based Vessel Communication and Support System that provides tracking, two-way messaging, SOS alerts, cyclone warnings, and potential fishing zone data but it’s been beset with challenges. In Andhra Pradesh, where transponders have been distributed, many fisherfolk keep them switched off because they don’t want their movements tracked, and some simply don’t see the value. Moreover, Nabhmitra offers safety and tracking, not broadband, making it hard for them to get the weather data, market prices or telemedicine at sea. It’s this gap that the LEO satellite looks to fill, albeit with a subsidy or cooperative model.

The government has capped Starlink at 2 million connections with restricted speeds, treating satellite link as a supplement rather than a substitute to existing infrastructure.

The False Binary
The debate has focused on the contest between Indian companies Reliance and Bharti versus Musk’s foreign one; postulating sovereignty versus foreign dependence debate but this is a wrong framing.

OneWeb India is backed by the Bharti Group but it sells access to the OneWeb satellite constellation, which belongs to Eutelsat Group. Eutelsat’s largest shareholder is the French government, at 29.65%, the UK government holds 10.89% and Bharti’s stake is 17.88%. The satellites are built by Airbus in Florida.

Jio Space Technology, the other “Indian” entrant, is a 51-49 joint venture between Jio Platforms and SES of Luxembourg, that’s one-third controlled by the Luxembourg government. The satellites are built by Boeing and Thales Alenia Space, and operated from Luxembourg. The JV operates on medium-earth orbit, aimed at large enterprises and mobile backhaul (carrying tower traffic back to the core network when laying fibre to the tower is uneconomic). Jio has a separate proposal for a 1,650-satelliteLEO constellation, positioned as sovereign self-reliant infrastructure, at an estimated cost of $10 to 15 billion. But it is some distance away as India neither has satellite mass-production facility at this scale for now, nor are its technology partners known.

Starlink, the “foreign” operator, holds a GMPCS licence through an Indian entity registered in Delhi, with signed distribution agreements with both Jio and Airtel.

In short, every “Indian” operator depends on foreign satellites, foreign manufacturing, and foreign technology. And the “foreign” operator depends on Indian telcos for distribution.

Security Vs Need
India issued detailed security conditions for satellite operators in May 2025, through the Department of Telecommunications, running into 29 additional requirements. All Indian traffic must pass through gateways on Indian soil, with no bypass through inter-satellite links and no mirroring of data abroad. Network control centres, data centres, and DNS resolution must be located in India. Lawful interception must be integrated with the Centralised Monitoring System. Special monitoring zones extend 50 km inside land borders and 200 nautical miles at sea, with geofencing and the ability to restrict or deny service to individuals, groups, or areas.

Section 20 of the Telecommunications Act, 2023 gives the central or state government the power to take temporary possession of any telecom network or suspend service during a public emergency or in the interest of public safety. The licence conditions carry parallel suspension and takeover clauses.

There have been similar demands in past from foreign technology platforms. After years of pushback, Blackberry eventually set up a lawful-interception arrangement. The RBI’s 2018 data localisation mandate forced Visa, Mastercard, and others to store Indian payment data on Indian servers.

But there is one key difference between satellite and other precedents, true as much for Starlink as for others like OneWeb (Bharti) or Jio-SES. When India tells a telecom operator to shut down, the instruction travels through infrastructure on Indian soil that can be physically accessed, repossessed and shut down. With satellite, India can inspect ground gateways but cannot verify routing decisions made in orbit, nor stop an operator from changing policy overnight. In each of these cases, thesoftware that controls where service is switched on and off is written and operated outside India, whether in the United States (SpaceX), Paris (Eutelsat), or Luxembourg (SES).

We have seen real world impact from this. In September 2022, when Ukraine asked to extend Starlink coverage near Crimea for a military operation against the Russian fleet, Musk refused saying Starlink “was not meant to be involved in wars.” On flip side, coincidentally in same month, after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody and a protest crackdown, Starlink activated service over Iran. By early 2026, an estimated 50,000 terminals were operating in the country. Iran’s military-grade GPS jamming cut performance by up to 80% in places, but a complete shutdown proved technically infeasible.

An operator can geo-fence a country, keep beams dark over territory it chooses to avoid or switch on against a government’s wishes. The question is who controls the switch and on whose authority.

It’s against this genuine concern, about control of an infrastructure layer that cannot be fully governed from within India’s borders, that one must weigh the legitimate need.

Even the Indian Army has no dedicated communications satellite; in terrain where mountains block every terrestrial signal, satellite is key to how forward positions talk to headquarters but its troops in Ladakh and the northeast operate on 30% of an Air Force satellite’s bandwidth, with a replacement delayed until mid-2028. In the 2024 floods in Assam, 646 base stations went dark and the current emergency backup is voice-only satellite phones at district offices. India’s terrestrial connectivity infrastructure, despite enormous investment, is fragile in places such as the seas and the mountains. The unconnected 10,000 villages, the fishing fleet and the merchant navy, and the disaster zones that need broadband back up that function during floods or storms, all need the reliable satellite connectivity.

So, What Should India Do?
India has been here before. When foreign payment networks were the only option for digital transactions, India didn’t ban Visa and Mastercard while building a domestic alternative. It regulated them, mandated data localisation, and built UPI and RuPay in parallel. Today, UPI processes over 80% of digital retail payments though the foreign networks continue to operate.

Satellite could follow the same logic: license the operators under the stringent well-governed conditions and build sovereign capacity alongside. But the sovereign track is running slow. GSAT-7B for the military and Jio’s proposed LEO constellation part of that parallel build, but are years from deployment. Even Nabhmitra, India’s own satellite safety system for fishermen, runs on a satellite (GSAT-6) with just a year or two of service life left, and its replacement hasn’t launched.

The 2 million connection cap buys India the time to calibrate but it must happen fast with the right institutional mechanisms to assess and manage the risk. DoT’s satellite advisory committee mainly comprises of people from telco operators. This makes sense for the commercial discussions but does not offer the most objective or expert lens to evaluate whether those 29 ground-level conditions are enough to govern infrastructure that orbits at 550 kilometres. This needs satellite engineers,cybersecurity specialists, international telecommunications lawyers but they don’t currently seem to be on the committee.

India’s fishing fleet, its flood-prone districts, its last 10,000 unconnected villages can’t wait for a perfect answer but nor can they afford to connect through infrastructure whose switch sits beyond India’s reach.

The switch in the sky and the need are real. The question is whether India is building the institutions that can reach it.

* This piece first appeared on Minari Shah’s Substack page, The Long View