Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw embraced Elon Musk’s Starlink eagerly on social media on Wednesday before deleting the tweet an hour later. Vaishnaw, also the minister of railways, had tweeted in a message on X, “Starlink, welcome to India! Will be useful for remote area railway projects.”
Musk’s SpaceX space-based internet platform Starlink has attracted the interest of leading Indian telcos Airtel and Jio, with both of them signing partnership deals with the firm. The partnerships, however, are subject to Starlink obtaining the requisite sanction from the Indian government to operate business in the country.
Airtel announced its collaboration with SpaceX on Tuesday, boasting of the possibility to link schools, health facilities, institutions, and communities in India’s far-flung rural towns. Bharti Airtel Ltd Managing Director and Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal said, “Partnering with SpaceX to offer Starlink to Airtel customers in India is an important milestone and further demonstrates our commitment to next-generation satellite connectivity.”
Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, and Founder of Bharti Enterprises also stated that Starlink launch would be complementing technologies like 4G, 5G, and future-generation technologies. “Just like 4G, 5G, and 6G in the future, now we will have one more technology in our kitty, i.e., SAT-G,” he added.
On the same day, Reliance Group’s Jio Platforms Limited also issued a statement about its collaboration with Starlink. Reliance Jio CEO Mathew Oommen emphasized that the collaboration is a groundbreaking move to enhance broadband connectivity in India. “By introducing Starlink into Jio’s broadband ecosystem, we are expanding our reach and enhancing the reliability and availability of high-speed broadband in this AI era,” he added.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX President and COO, greeted the expectation of getting government clearance in India. “We welcome Jio’s initiative towards creating India’s connectivity. We look forward to working with Jio and getting clearance from the Government of India to allow more people, groups, and businesses to have access to Starlink’s high-speed internet service,” she stated.
Starlink has been attempting to enter the Indian market since 2022, and there was initial resistance from Airtel and Jio. At the India Mobile Congress in 2024, Mittal suggested that satellite companies have to purchase spectrum and pay license fees, as with traditional telecom companies. This was echoed by Jio, and to that Musk replied by labeling the request for an auction-like process as “unprecedented” and raised eyebrows over the difficulty of getting clearances for conducting Starlink business in India.
