Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (r) & Akshat Johri
As dawn breaks over Sriharikota and the steel of a launch gantry glitters under the first light, India’s space ambitions feel both familiar and entirely new. Familiar because ISRO’s precision and ingenuity have long been the envy of the world. New because the space economy India seeks to build today is no longer confined to missions or milestones — it is about creating an industrial and strategic infrastructure that can support a nation’s ascent into the next era of global power. To do this, India must now embrace a framework that every major spacefaring nation has employed to scale: Public–Private Partnerships.
Around the world, PPPs have rewritten the rules of space development. The United States used them to create commercial cargo and crew programs. Europe adopted them to build Earth Observation constellations that serve both government and commercial markets. Japan leveraged PPPs to seed entirely new segments such as debris removal. India, with its rapidly expanding private space ecosystem, sits at a similar crossroads. What it requires now is a procurement and partnership architecture that enables industry to scale, investors to participate, and government agencies — particularly defence — to access space-based capabilities with the speed that current geopolitical realities demand.
A crucial part of this moment is the recognition that space is no longer a siloed scientific enterprise. It has become an enabling layer that underpins nearly every strategic and economic activity on Earth. As terrestrial conflict becomes increasingly information- centric, space systems — imaging, communications, navigation, and surveillance — form the backbone of national security. At the same time, these very systems drive agriculture, climate monitoring, digital connectivity, disaster early-warning, logistics, and commercial innovation. This fusion of civilian and defence utility is what the world now terms as dual-use, and it is here that India possesses a unique opportunity.
The core philosophy guiding this transition is the global shift towards dual-use space systems, which have become the norm rather than the exception. Dual-use architecture enables a satellite constellation to serve defence and civilian needs simultaneously. They make space assets more sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable. They ensure that the government does not need separate fleets for national security and public services. They create economic viability for industry and strategic certainty for defence.
The second defining factor is the role of defence as India’s anchor buyer. No single customer in the Indian ecosystem has the scale, continuity, or mission-critical urgency that the armed forces possess. Unlike civilian ministries, defence demand is non-cyclical, intensifying each year as geopolitics shifts and border tensions escalate. Defence requires persistent surveillance, encrypted communication, resilient navigation, early-warning intelligence, and secure access to bandwidth that cannot fail in the face of terrestrial disruptions. The military’s requirements are not occasional — they are structural, accelerating, and foundational. This makes defence the anchor that can provide long-term stability to India’s PPP ecosystem. When defence commits to multi-year service contracts or constellation-buy agreements, private industry gains the revenue visibility needed to invest in manufacturing capabilities, ground infrastructure, and advanced R&D. Investors follow, global partners align, and India’s space startups cease to be “projects” and instead become durable institutions.
Within this rising PPP landscape, Satellite Communications (SatCom) stands out as the single most transformative opportunity for India and, arguably, the one most aligned with defence needs, national economic goals, and global commercial demand. Satellite communications are no longer confined to remote villages or offshore platforms; they are the backbone of modern connectivity. They power aircraft navigation, maritime safety, encrypted battlefield communication, disaster coordination, remote education, energy grids, and rural connectivity. India’s terrestrial networks are extensive, but they are neither invincible nor omnipresent. SatCom fills the gaps that fibre cannot reach and provides redundancy that no terrestrial network can match.
Globally, SatCom PPP models have accelerated the rise of billion-dollar constellations and secure national broadband grids. The most famous example is SpaceX’s Starlink, a constellation funded by commercial financing, catalyzed by large U.S. government contracts for capacity and military-grade terminals. The U.S. Department of Defense, NATO, and allied forces became significant customers, ensuring the network’s sustainability and rapid scale. Starlink demonstrated that when private innovation and government demand combine, broadband constellations can expand faster than any traditional telecom network.
Another instructive example is Luxembourg’s GovSat, a dedicated PPP between the Luxembourg government and SES. Here, a sovereign nation invested directly in a secure communication satellite while leveraging SES’s global expertise, creating a dual-use system for defence and civilian use. The U.S. WGS (Wideband Global SATCOM) constellation is another example of the Department of Defense partnering with Boeing and allied nations to create a secure broadband network that also supports humanitarian and civilian operations. These case studies hold powerful lessons for India. They show that SatCom constellations succeed when governments act not only as regulators, but as early, committed buyers.
Alongside SatCom, India must now prioritize expanding its Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) capabilities — the invisible foundation upon which modern economies and militaries operate. PNT is indispensable for transportation, energy grids, financial systems, logistics, precision agriculture, drone operations, and defence missions.
Europe’s Galileo followed a PPP-inspired structure in its early phases, combining private financing with EU oversight before evolving into a fully public-led constellation that now supports aviation, maritime, and encrypted defence services. Japan’s QZSS similarly leverages a hybrid model, in which government anchors demand for precision navigation while private industry develops applications for mobility, telecom, and disaster response. These cases show how countries secure autonomy in navigation by coupling defence-grade requirements with commercial scalability — a pathway India can emulate through PPP-driven NavIC expansion.
Equally essential is the development of Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) satellite capability under PPP structures. In an era of escalating electronic warfare, ELINT systems have become central to national security. ELINT satellites detect and analyze radar emissions, communication intercepts, and electronic signatures, offering early-warning insights, electronic order-of-battle mapping, maritime domain awareness, and real-time threat detection across India’s neighbourhood. A powerful global example for ELINT development comes from the United States, where the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has increasingly adopted IDIQ-style multi-vendor procurement models to accelerate electronic intelligence capability. Instead of relying on a single prime contractor, the NRO awards flexible, multi-year IDIQ contracts to multiple industry players — including traditional primes such as Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as emerging commercial RF analytics companies such as HawkEye 360 and Aurora Insight. This model shows how distributed procurement, anchored by defence but executed through industry competition, can dramatically accelerate ELINT capability — a structure India could adapt through PPPs to achieve sovereign electronic intelligence dominance.
What binds all of these opportunities together is the sheer scale of India’s current trajectory. The country is rapidly becoming a hub for launch vehicles, satellite manufacturing, space-based analytics, in-space robotics, and SSA capabilities. But without a structured PPP framework that integrates dual-use design, defence procurement, blended finance, and multi-year contracting, this ecosystem risks growing in pockets rather than maturing into a globally competitive industry. India has the engineering talent, the cost advantage, the strategic demand, and the global goodwill — what it needs now is a procurement model that matches the pace of ambition.
A future where India builds one rocket a month, manufactures hundreds of satellites a year, deploys homegrown communication and navigation constellations, and becomes a regional leader in space sustainability is entirely possible. It only requires aligning government as a market-maker, defence as an anchor buyer, and industry as the engine of innovation. PPP provides the architecture for this alignment. Dual-use systems provide efficiency. Defence provides the certainty. And industry provides the scale. In that sense, India’s rise as a global space power will not be defined solely by how high its rockets fly, but by how deeply its partnerships are built. If the country embraces PPP as the foundation of its orbital ambitions, then the next decade will not just be about India participating in the space economy — it will be about India shaping it.
Lt Gen AK Bhatt PVSM UYSM AVSM SM VSM (r), Founding Director General of the Indian Space Association and Chairman of IIIT Kota and Ranchi, is a distinguished former Indian Army officer with over 39 years of service, including as Director General Military Operations and Chinar Corps Commander. Akshat Johri is Assistant General Manager, IIFCL Projects Ltd. He is a Project finance and PPP advisory professional with 16 years of experience structuring innovative infrastructure models across India’s strategic sectors. At IIFCL Projects Ltd, he has advised on landmark initiatives including the Earth Observation PPP under IN-SPACe and the LVM3 launch vehicle PPP with NSIL, enabling private participation in India’s space ecosystem.
