New Delhi [India], July 17: Regulators, road-safety authorities, research institutions and the auto industry converge on a safety-first, technology-neutral and inclusive path to make Vehicle-to-Everything technology work on real Indian roads and start saving lives from day one.
New Delhi, 10 July 2026 — As India accelerates towards its Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, the ITS India Forum convened a high-level Round Table Discussion on the regulatory framework for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar International Centre, New Delhi. Held under the theme “India Connected Mobility and V2X Roadmap for Viksit Bharat 2047,” the session brought regulators, industry, academia and road-safety experts to one table, with keynote interventions across two moderated sessions, to shape a common national response to TRAI’s Consultation Paper on V2X ahead of its Open House Discussion on 23 July 2026.
A structural shift for a generational crisis
The urgency is stark. India recorded over 1.7 lakh road deaths in 2024 — the highest toll of any country in the world, with road crashes costing the economy an estimated 3.14% of GDP each year. Despite sustained investment in engineering, enforcement and awareness, fatalities keep rising. Connected-vehicle technology represents the first genuinely structural shift available to Indian road-safety policy in a generation: the ability to warn a driver, a pedestrian or an intersection of danger before a collision occurs, rather than merely recording it afterwards.
The Forum framed the core idea in the starkest possible terms. As per the government’s own Sarathi driver database, India has over 20 crore (200 million) licensed drivers — a population larger than most countries on earth, spanning every social background, skill level, language and driving culture imaginable. No training programme, however ambitious, can lift 200 million people to a single standard of judgement and discipline on a road that everyone is forced to share. If the solution depends on perfecting human behaviour at that scale, it will fail. The only lever that scales is the vehicle itself: engineered, networked and made uniformly aware of danger, regardless of who is behind the wheel.
“We have over 20 crore — 200 million — drivers on Indian roads today, as per the government’s own Sarathi database. They come from different social backgrounds, skill levels and driving cultures. We cannot bring 200 million people to the same standard of understanding on a road all of them have to share — that is not a training problem, it is a scale problem, and scale problems are not solved person by person. But we can control the vehicles. Uniformly. Every time. With technology. So the question before us is simple: do we keep betting road safety on human perfection, or do we finally shift that burden to the vehicle itself? I know which bet I would take — controlling vehicles through connected-vehicle technology, not chasing the impossible task of perfecting every driver.”
— Mr. Akhilesh Srivastava, President, ITS India Forum
India picks its path
Anchoring the regulatory discussion, Shri Akhilesh Kumar Trivedi (Advisor, Network, Spectrum & Licensing, TRAI) traced how the enabling framework under the Telecommunications Act, 2023 supports connected mobility, and set out the consultation’s open questions. India is converging on Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) as its harmonised ITS technology, with 30 MHz of spectrum (5875–5905 MHz) earmarked for initial deployment and a further 20 MHz (5905–5925 MHz) reserved for future ITS use. On-Board Units in vehicles are licence-exempt for easy adoption, while Roadside Units require authorisation to keep deployment coordinated — a quiet but genuinely significant milestone.
“The Consultation Paper is not TRAI dictating an answer — it is TRAI asking industry and civil society to help us get the answer right. Every open question in this paper is genuinely open.”
— Shri Akhilesh Kumar Trivedi, Advisor, TRAI
One Roadside Unit can save lives from day one
A recurring theme was that safety benefits need not wait for mass adoption. Mr. Rojer Babu (Technical Director, Danlaw Technologies India) welcomed the de-licensing of V2V spectrum but stressed the “network-effect” reality: vehicle-to-vehicle communication becomes powerful only once a large share of the fleet is connected, whereas a single Roadside Unit at a dangerous junction begins protecting every passing vehicle immediately, regardless of who is driving. This makes infrastructure-first deployment (V2I) the fastest path to real-world impact, and the priority for India’s near-term rollout.
“V2V only becomes useful once a large share of vehicles are connected, and that could take a decade. A single Roadside Unit protects an intersection from the very first day it is switched on. If we are serious about saving lives soon, infrastructure has to come first.”
— Mr. Rojer Babu, Technical Director, Danlaw Technologies India
Built for Indian roads, not imported wholesale
India’s safety case is structurally different from Western markets. Dr. Mukti Advani (Senior Principal Scientist, CRRI) pointed to data showing that nearly 65% of India’s road fatalities involve two-wheeler riders and pedestrians — the hardest and costliest to protect. With bikes, autos, tractors and people sharing the road amid limited lane discipline, use-cases, sensor fusion and certification norms must be designed for India’s mixed-traffic reality. Reinforcing the point, Mr. Suresh Chandra (former Sr. Director/DDG, STQC, MeitY) urged localisation for local languages and diverse users, encrypted communication and indigenous chipsets, warning that a warning a driver cannot understand is no warning at all.
“Two-wheelers and pedestrians are nearly two-thirds of our fatalities. If we design V2X use-cases the way Europe or America did — built around cars talking to cars — we will have built the wrong system for India.”
— Dr. Mukti Advani, Senior Principal Scientist, CRRI
Keep it open, shared and fair
A strong consensus held that safety-critical spectrum at 5.9 GHz should remain shared, non-exclusive and safety-first. Auctioning it exclusively to telecom licensees, participants cautioned, would raise costs and shut out precisely the entities best placed to deploy roadside infrastructure at scale — road authorities, smart-city SPVs and State governments. The Forum’s position rests on four guiding principles: prioritise rollout and road safety; no monopoly and no high barriers to entry; interoperability through common standards so every vendor’s devices work together; and spectrum that stays shared and accessible, in line with global best practice.
Industry ready to move — with evidence, not haste
The automotive industry signalled clear intent. Mr. Prashant Banerjee (CEO & Executive Director, SIAM) outlined a roadmap oriented toward spectrum release and backed the Supreme Court Committee’s road-safety focus, while advocating a phased approach — roughly six months of structured testing before communication is gradually widened. Chief Guest Shri Sanjay Bandopadhyaya, IAS (Retd.), Member of the Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety, anchored the accountability perspective, insisting that every intervention be backed by data and every authorised operator be answerable for outcomes. Speakers also flagged a critical lesson from earlier projects: on-paper compliance does not equal field-grade performance, making open-road pilots and phased, security-hardened rollouts essential.
“Industry is ready to move, but readiness is not the same as recklessness. Give us six months of structured, honest testing before we widen the net — that is how you build a technology people actually trust on the road.”
— Mr. Prashant Banerjee, CEO & Executive Director, SIAM
A phased roadmap towards 2047
Rather than a single national mandate, the Forum favoured a phased path: finalising the regulatory and spectrum framework in the near term; piloting Roadside Units on two or three high-fatality corridors such as the Samruddhi Expressway and the Delhi–Jaipur highway; scaling to State-identified black-spot corridors and urban intersections with standards aligned across MoRTH and ARAI; and, ultimately, nationwide V2I corridor coverage that unlocks V2V value as vehicle penetration rises — integrated with National Highways and India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 mobility goals. The consolidated outcomes will be submitted as the Forum’s formal response to TRAI ahead of the 23 July Open House Discussion.
“What happened in this room today was rare — a regulator, industry, academia and road-safety authorities agreeing on the same direction, not defending separate turfs. Our job now is to make sure that consensus reaches TRAI in writing, in time, and with one voice.”
— Dr. Shiv Kumar, Director General, ITS India Forum
dg@itsindiaforum.com
As India builds towards 2047, the message from the Round Table was resolute: a connected, interoperable and safety-first mobility ecosystem — engineered for Indian conditions, open to every class of deployer, and validated on real roads — can save lives from day one and steer the nation confidently towards Viksit Bharat.
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