New Delhi: Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday welcomed Elon Musk’s Starlink to India and said it will help railway projects in remote areas of the country.
“Starlink, welcome to India! Will be useful for remote area railway projects,” Vaishnaw posted on social media platform X.
Vaishnaw is also the minister for information and broadcasting, as well as electronics and information technology.
His comments follow two separate deals with Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms and Sunil MIttal’s Bharti Airtel struck by SpaceX, the aerospace company led by Musk, to bring Starlink’s broadband internet services to India.
The two deals follow months of bickering over how Musk’s venture should be granted spectrum rights.
Over the past few months, rivals Jio and Airtel had come together to demand an auction for awarding spectrum for satellite services in India as they feared an administrative allocation would give Musk airwaves at a price lower than what they had paid via auctions in the past.
Jio will offer Starlink equipment in retail outlets and online stores and also support customer installation and activation on devices. Jio and SpaceX will also explore how they can boost each other’s offerings.
Starlink is the world’s largest low-earth-orbit (LEO) constellation operated by SpaceX.
On Tuesday, Bharti Airtel announced that it is entering into an agreement with SpaceX to bring Starlink’s high-speed Internet service to India on a non-exclusive basis. Bharti already partners with Eutelsat OneWeb, the second-largest LEO constellation.
Similarly, Jio Platforms has a joint venture with SES, another leading global satellite-based content connectivity solutions provider.
Starlink can help Bharti and Jio provide connectivity to previously underserved areas, especially areas currently with limited to no coverage.
The deals by Airtel and Jio come weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Musk, seen as very close to US President Donald Trump, in Washington to discuss issues, including space, mobility, technology and innovation.
Modi was in the US to meet Trump, who in his second term as the US President upped the ratchet on tariffs against various countries, including India.
(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ’s editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
