India Opens the Airwaves to Save Lives: Gazette Notification Enables V2X Communication on 5.9 GHz Spectrum
New Delhi [India], June 25: India has de-licensed 30 MHz of spectrum in the 5875–5905 MHz band for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, a regulatory milestone that positions the country alongside the EU, US, Japan, and South Korea in advancing connected mobility infrastructure.
NEW DELHI — on a morning that will be remembered in the annals of Indian transport policy, the Government of India published a Gazette Notification that does something deceptively simple: it opens a frequency. But the consequences of that act are anything but simple. For the first time, vehicles on Indian roads will be able to communicate with each other, with roadside infrastructure, with traffic systems in real time, without a license, and without delay. The 5.9 GHz band (5875–5905 MHz), long the domain of technical working groups and consultation papers, is now the operating frequency of India’s road safety future.
India’s road fatality numbers have resisted every conventional intervention. Nearly 1.7 lakh lives are lost annually, a toll that amounts to one death approximately every three minutes, every day, across the length and breadth of the country. Successive governments have legislated, invested, and campaigned. Yet the roads have remained stubbornly lethal. V2X technology, cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems that enable On Board Units (OBUs) to exchange safety-critical data with Roadside Units (RSUs) and other vehicles represents a categorically different intervention. Studies across mature V2X deployments globally indicate that the technology can prevent up to 80 percent of crashes involving unimpaired drivers. The Gazette Notification de-licensing this spectrum is, at its core, a decision to introduce that capability to Indian roads at scale.
The mechanics of the notification are precise. By de-licensing 30 MHz for V2V communication within the 5.9 GHz band, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), in coordination with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), removes the single largest deployment barrier that has held back cooperative ITS in India: the requirement for individual spectrum licenses. Device manufacturers, automotive OEMs, ITS solution providers, and highway operators can now build, certify, and deploy V2X-enabled equipment with full regulatory certainty. The road to scale across the National Highway network managed by NHAI and beyond is now clear.
