Modi announces 5G covers every district as India opens sixth-generation policy track

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the 10th India Mobile Congress (IMC 2026) on 8 October at the Yashobhoomi convention centre in New Delhi, declaring that 5G service now reaches every district in the country. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Cellular Operators Association of India co-organised the four-day event under the theme 'Scale Without Boundaries'. Speaking at the inauguration, Modi said India had deployed more than 5.5 lakh — 550,000 — 5G base stations and that mobile internet speeds had risen approximately tenfold compared with 2022. The announcement marks the formal close of India's primary 5G coverage phase and, taken alongside Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia's concurrent target of one billion 5G subscribers by 2030, sets out the next stage of the country's digital infrastructure policy.

Coverage milestone and the subscriber target

India launched commercial 5G services in October 2022 and has expanded the network through a combination of spectrum auctions, government production-linked incentive schemes and carrier investment. The figure of 5.5 lakh base stations, cited by Modi in his inaugural address, covers all 800-plus districts of the country, though coverage within districts remains uneven, particularly in rural and hilly terrain. Scindia's target of one billion 5G subscribers by 2030 represents a near-doubling from an estimated 550 million today within a total mobile subscriber base of approximately 1.2 billion. Reaching that figure would require sustained network densification, handset ecosystem expansion and competitive tariff structures from the three main carriers — Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea — across the remainder of the decade.

The IMC served as a venue for exhibitors, standards bodies and government agencies rather than as a formal legislative forum; the announcements made there carry the weight of ministerial commitments and DoT policy signals rather than notified regulations. Nevertheless, the subscriber target and the 6G agenda communicated at the event will inform the DoT's next planning cycle and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's follow-on recommendations on spectrum, tariffs and network sharing.

6G standardisation and WRC-27 preparation

The 3rd International 6G Symposium, embedded within IMC 2026, brought together delegations from standards bodies including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and regional partners to align on spectrum requirements for International Mobile Telecommunications 2030 (IMT-2030), the technical designation for 6G. The central policy objective from India's perspective is to shape the spectrum allocations that member states will negotiate at the World Radiocommunication Conference 2027 (WRC-27). In February 2026, the DoT published a spectrum roadmap for 6G services, identifying candidate frequency bands including mid-band and upper-mid-band ranges already used for 5G, plus new mmWave and sub-THz allocations. The roadmap also updated the National Frequency Allocation Plan to identify the 6,425–7,125 megahertz band for international mobile telecommunications.

India's Bharat 6G Vision, released by the DoT in 2023 and updated in subsequent roadmap documents, commits the country to both using and contributing to 6G standards, in contrast with its posture during the 3G and 4G eras when it was predominantly a standards-consumer. The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), a government research body, has been tasked with developing an indigenous radio access network stack, and demonstrators shown at IMC 2026 illustrated progress in open-RAN and AI-native network architectures. The practical significance is that domestic intellectual property in the 6G stack would reduce India's dependence on vendor equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei while generating potential licensing income.

ITU hosting bid and multilateral positioning

Alongside the technical discussions at IMC 2026, India's bid to host the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference PP-2030 remained a reference point for the country's multilateral ambitions in telecommunications governance. The ITU Council, meeting in Geneva in May 2026, accepted India's proposal; final ratification is expected at the Doha plenipotentiary conference in November 2026. If confirmed, India would host the ITU's four-yearly governing assembly — which sets the organisation's budget, elects its leadership and decides major policy directions for global telecom — for the first time, and would become the first South Asian country to do so. Hosting the PP-2030 conference, combined with an active 6G standards agenda, would give India a structural platform to influence the regulatory framework within which next-generation spectrum is allocated globally.

The broader context is a global contest over 6G infrastructure similar in character to the competition over 5G that played out between 2018 and 2022. The United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea and China have each published 6G roadmaps and are funding national R&D programmes. India's simultaneous pursuit of an indigenous stack, active WRC-27 participation, and multilateral hosting signals a deliberate decision to contest technological standard-setting rather than deferring to external vendors and standards bodies. Whether that ambition can be matched by sufficient R&D spending and industrial capacity within the available timeline for WRC-27 and IMT-2030 adoption remains an open question that will be answered in part by the DoT's next-generation investment framework.

Sources

• Department of Telecommunications — India Mobile Congress 2026 official programme
• Press Information Bureau — Digital India Nears 11 Years (PRID 2278453)
• Department of Telecommunications — Spectrum Roadmap for 6G Services, February 2026
• ETV Bharat — PM Modi calls Digital India a push for technology access, 5G/6G at IMC 2026
• Business Standard — India Mobile Congress 2026 begins Oct 7 with 6G, AI, cybersecurity in focus
• Mobility India — IMC 2026 Inaugural Day convenes global leaders on 6G testbeds
• Punjab Kesari English — India secures ITU Council backing to host PP-2030
• Tele.net.in — India likely to host ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2030
• International Telecommunication Union — ITU Council circular on PP-2030 host proposals
• TelecomLead — India Mobile Congress 2026 opens with focus on 6G, AI and digital infrastructure