On March 23, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a document that received modest international attention but considerable domestic significance. The Bharat 6G Vision set out India's intention to be a frontline contributor to the design, development, and deployment of sixth-generation telecommunications technology by 2030. The language was deliberate. India had followed the world on 4G. It had walked alongside the world on 5G, deploying rapidly but contributing little to the underlying standards. The aspiration for 6G was different: to lead.

Two years into that mission, the honest assessment is one of genuine progress, structural constraints, and a race against a window that is not infinitely open. India is not where the Bharat 6G Vision imagined it would be by now. It is also not as far behind as its critics suggest. The truth, as with most things in Indian technology policy, lies in the distinction between ambition and execution.

What 6G Actually Is, and Why the Race Matters Now

As of 2026, 6G remains in the research, standardisation, and early prototyping stage globally. No country has deployed it. The international framework is being developed under the ITU's IMT-2030 standard, with candidate radio interface technologies expected to be submitted between 2027 and early 2029, and final specifications targeted for approval around 2030, allowing early commercial deployment toward the end of the decade. The Defense News

The first 6G specification in 3GPP Release 21 is expected by 2028, with commercial services first anticipated in 2030. RCR Wireless News This is why the window matters. The period from now until approximately 2028 is when the critical decisions are made — about spectrum, about architecture, about what use cases 6G will be optimised for, and most importantly, about which countries' intellectual property ends up embedded in the global standard. Countries that contribute to the standard own royalties from every 6G device sold anywhere in the world. Countries that do not contribute pay those royalties. The 5G era cost India dearly on this count. The 6G era represents the chance to change the equation.

6G is expected to enable AI-native networks, integrated sensing and communication, terahertz spectrum usage, and integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks — enabling applications ranging from holographic communication and digital twins to real-time remote surgery and advanced autonomous systems. Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business The technology will not merely be faster than 5G. It will be architecturally different, with intelligence embedded at the network level rather than added on top.

The Global Battlefield

The 6G race is, at its core, a contest between China and the United States, with a cluster of technologically advanced nations — South Korea, Japan, Finland, Sweden, and Germany — competing for the positions that matter in standards bodies and patent portfolios.

As of the first half of 2025, China accounted for approximately 40.3 percent of global 6G patent applications, ranking first in the world. DIGITIMES The composition of that lead reflects deliberate strategy: China's filings are concentrated in mobile infrastructure technology, precisely where the economic rents from standard-essential patents are highest. Huawei, China Mobile, ZTE, and state-backed research institutions are the primary contributors, building on the foundation China established in 5G, where Huawei holds the largest single company share of standard-essential patents globally.

Two competing visions for 6G architecture are emerging. The United States, European Union, Japan, and South Korea are promoting open, interoperable systems built on shared open interfaces and standards — the Open RAN model. China is leading the alternative model of sovereign digital ecosystems, favouring strategic autonomy and domestic control over network capabilities. Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business This architectural divergence is not merely technical. It reflects fundamentally different theories of how telecommunications infrastructure should be governed, and which countries should control the chokepoints.

China holds more than 4,600 documented 6G patent filings, the United States more than 2,200, and South Korea approximately 760, alongside government programmes targeting early commercial 6G services before 2030. The Defense News The standards body 3GPP, where much of the real technical work happens, is dominated by Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Qualcomm. India does not yet have a company in that group.

Where India Actually Stands

Against this backdrop, India's current position is one of emerging but still modest participation. India has recorded approximately 265 patents associated with 6G technologies as of recent assessments The Defense News — a fraction of China's 4,600-plus, but a number that has been growing. India now ranks among the top six countries globally in 6G patent filings IBEF, which is a notable achievement given where India stood in 5G standardisation. The sector remains dominated by China and the US, with China controlling as much as 45 percent of patents in terahertz communication Business Standard — one of the critical technology areas for 6G.

On the institutional side, India has moved with unusual speed. PM Modi released the Bharat 6G Vision document in March 2023, envisioning India as a frontline contributor to 6G design, development, and deployment by 2030, structured as a nine-year mission from 2022 to 2031 in three phases, aimed at leading to field trials and global standard contributions. Bharatexhibitions The Telecom Technology Development Fund was the financial mechanism: as of February 2026, 104 projects amounting to ₹271 crore have been approved for 6G research and development under the TTDF scheme. TelecomTalk

The Bharat 6G Alliance, which brings together industry, academia, startups, research institutions, and standardisation bodies, comprises 80-plus member organisations including 30-plus startups as of July 2025. Press Information BureauThe alliance has signed MoUs with international counterparts: the Bharat 6G Alliance has agreements with countries including the United States, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Finland, Brazil, and the UK to boost research activities. RCR Wireless News An MoU with the European Space Agency was also signed in October 2025.

The 3GPP contribution numbers are particularly telling. India's 3GPP contributions have surged 75 percent since 2022, driven by the Bharat 6G Vision, marking a decisive push to influence global 6G standards. GreyB This is the metric that actually determines whether a country shapes the standard or inherits it. India's contributions remain small in absolute terms relative to China, Huawei, and the major European and Korean vendors — but the trajectory is the right one.

The government's stated target is explicit: Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has announced India's ambition to contribute 10 percent of global patents to future 6G standards, with the Bharat 6G initiative having expanded from 12 organisations in 2022 to over 1,800 participating organisations today. New Kerala

The Structural Constraints

Honest analysis requires naming the gaps that the official narrative tends to understate.

The first is the absence of an Indian telecom equipment company of global scale. Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, and ZTE are the five companies that genuinely shape 6G's technical direction. None of them are Indian. India has telecom operators — Reliance Jio, Airtel, BSNL — but operators are consumers of equipment standards, not setters of them. The Bharat 6G Vision explicitly aims to create indigenous telecom equipment manufacturers, but that transition takes a decade, not a year. The TTDF-funded projects are research grants, not the engineering pipelines of global equipment vendors.

The second constraint is the 5G baseline. As of February 2026, 5.23 lakh 5G base transceiver stations have been installed across India, with 5G services available in 99.9 percent of districts. Fiinews The rollout has been genuinely impressive in speed terms. But the equipment deployed is almost entirely from foreign vendors — Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung for private operators, and an ongoing effort to build indigenous equipment for BSNL. The 5G installed base does not translate automatically into 6G R&D capacity, and India's domestic semiconductor manufacturing, still nascent, means that even if Indian researchers develop 6G technologies, fabrication will initially remain dependent on external foundries.

The third is the patent quality question. Ranking sixth in 6G patent filings is an achievement. But filing volume and standard-essential patent quality are different things. The companies that shape 3GPP standards file patents designed to become embedded in the specification — so that every implementation of the standard requires a license. India's filings are growing in number, but the DoT has itself acknowledged the need to identify specific technological niches where Indian IP can achieve standard-essential status, rather than spreading effort thinly across the entire 6G landscape.

The Opportunity

None of these constraints are insurmountable within the 6G timeline, and India has several genuine advantages that are often underappreciated.

The first is time. The 6G standard will not be frozen until approximately 2028. India has five years of active participation in the standardisation window — more than enough to move from sixth-largest patent filer to meaningful standard-setter in specific niches, if the R&D funding is deployed with strategic focus rather than broad diffusion.

The second is talent. Global giants including Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nokia are using Indian R&D centres not just for local market strategies but to drive cutting-edge 6G intellectual property, with foreign companies now contributing to 35 percent of India's 6G filings — signalling that India's talent pool is a key factor in the development of next-generation wireless technologies. GreyB The challenge is ensuring that this talent generates IP owned by Indian entities rather than simply serving as offshore R&D for foreign corporations.

The third is the use-case advantage. India's domestic market is the largest in the world for certain 6G applications — agriculture, healthcare, education, and manufacturing digitisation at a scale no other country can match. If India can define 6G use cases around its own development priorities and embed those use cases in the ITU IMT-2030 framework, it secures both a market advantage and a standards influence that pure patent counts do not capture.

The government has projected that indigenous 6G development could contribute approximately ₹85 lakh crore — roughly one trillion dollars — to India's economy by 2035. IBEF That figure is speculative, as all decade-horizon projections must be. But the order of magnitude reflects a genuine strategic logic: countries that shape 6G standards will extract royalties from the technology infrastructure of the entire connected world for the following decade. The economic case for Indian 6G investment is not primarily domestic deployment. It is IP ownership.

The Verdict

Where does India actually stand in the 6G race? It stands as a serious but not yet decisive participant. It has built the institutional architecture — the alliance, the funding mechanism, the vision document, the spectrum roadmap, the international partnerships. It has increased its standardisation contributions significantly and is now a top-six patent filer globally. It has the talent base that the world's leading telecom companies are actively deploying for 6G R&D.

What it does not yet have is a globally competitive Indian telecom equipment company, a concentration of IP in the specific niches that will become standard-essential, or a domestic semiconductor fabrication capability that would close the hardware loop.

The 2028 window is the relevant deadline. If India's 3GPP contributions continue to grow at the current pace, if the TTDF funding is directed strategically toward terahertz communications and AI-native network architecture — the two areas where early concentration of IP would yield the highest standard-setting leverage — and if Jio's reported ambitions in telecom equipment manufacturing produce a commercially viable product, India's 6G position will look considerably stronger by the time the standard is frozen than it does today.

The task is achievable. It is also not guaranteed. The difference between the two outcomes will be determined in the next three years, in standards bodies most people have never heard of, by engineers filing patents that most policymakers will never read.

The Hind covers geopolitics, geoeconomics, technology, and strategic affairs from New Delhi.