Indian GPS in place

With its seventh and fil vigation satellite placed successfully in orbit, India now has its own global positioning system. The US has a complement of 24 satellites to keep its GPS in operation, as does Russia with its Gloss. Europe’s Galileo is coming up in near future, while the Chinese and the Japanese have their own regiol coverage systems. The Indian Regiol vigation Satellite System (IRNSS) will find applications in terrestrial, aerial and marine vigation, tracking vehicles and maging fleets, accurate time determition, disaster magement, integration with mobile telephony, mapping and many other fields. Overall, two types of services will be provided — standard positioning service for all users and restricted service for likely defence purposes. After all, the country’s space programme planners decided to go for an indigenous GPS back in 1999 during the Kargil year, when the US administration refused to provide GPS data to help the Indian army precisely locate positions of Pakistani Rangers. So at a very economical cost of Rs 1,420 crore, India now has a space-based system to provide positiol accuracy better than 20 m over its territory and about 1,500 sq km beyond. It is another feather in the cap of ISRO’s scientists, which Prime Minister Modi has hailed as the latest example of ‘Make in India, Made in India and Made for Indians’.