Bengaluru: Global Positioning System or GPS is a technology that helps immensely in navigation. It is owned by the United States of America, but the service is available for all.

Imagine one such critical tool, designed and owned by India. As fantastic as it sounds, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is in talks with two chipset makers – Qualcomm (US based) and Broadcom (Singapore based) to incorporate mobile phones with NavIC, India’s own version of GPS.

A Times of India report quoted ISRO chairman K Sivan saying, “There are ongoing discussions. There is nothing conclusive so far. This will be a gamechanger, but you must understand that we are still in the process.”

In this regard, the ISRO has launched eight satellites, called the Indian Regional Navigation Satellites (IRNS).

Not just cell phones, even advertisers can make use of this technology to improve their business.

In the report K Sivan went on to say, “We are looking at NavIC in autorickshaws carrying advertisements in the future. Advertisers currently do not know if an ad is reaching the target audience or not and how many places the auto goes. With this technology, they will have the exact details.”

The paper also quoted a chipset analyst, Shobhit Srivastava saying, “India’s smartphone market has huge potential in terms of numbers because of a lot of new users. In the context of Make in India and Design in India, the government will push firms to design and make the chipsets in India. There are more than 650 million mobile users in India. Even basic phones now come with LTE and these chips can be inserted in them too.”