India Rewrites the Rules of Road Safety: Akhilesh Srivastava’s Three-Year Campaign Unlocks C-V2X, the Technology That Talks Cars Out of Collisions

Landmark Gazette Notification G.S.R. 466(E) de-licenses the 5875–5905 MHz spectrum for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything communication — a policy breakthrough that experts say could eliminate up to 80% of preventable road accidents and save tens of thousands of Indian lives annually.

New Delhi [India], June 20: In a decision that transportation historians will mark as India’s Apollo moment for road safety, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) published G.S.R. 466(E) in the Gazette of India on June 10, 2026 – exempting Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) On Board Units operating in the 5875–5905 MHz band from all spectrum licensing requirements, effective immediately. Issued under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, and the Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933, the notification arrived in tandem with G.S.R. 468(E), which simultaneously de-licensed the 77–81 GHz band for automotive short-range radar, together forming the complete twin-pillar regulatory foundation that India’s intelligent transportation ecosystem has long awaited.

Behind this milestone stands one man whose name has been synonymous with connected mobility advocacy in India for nearly a decade: Akhilesh Srivastava — IIT gold medallist, former Chief General Manager of NHAI, former COO of IHMCL, former CEO of NHAI InvIT, President of ITS India Forum, Ex-President of IRF India Chapter, India Chapter Lead for WEF Road Safety 2.0, Chairman of the Bitumen Forum of India, Senior Advisor at McKinsey, IT Advisor to the Government of Uttarakhand, and author of five seminal works including AI in Infrastructure Development and A Dream of Billions — Road Safety 2.0. It is no overstatement to say: this notification exists because of him.

“This notification is not just about technology — it is about protecting lives, improving mobility, and creating a safer transportation ecosystem for future generations. C-V2X alerts drivers in milliseconds to hazards they cannot see with their own eyes — a vehicle braking around a blind curve, an emergency vehicle approaching from a hidden lane, a pedestrian stepping off a footpath into fog. The majority of India’s 1,77,000 annual road deaths are caused by avoidable human mistakes. This technology removes human reaction time from the equation. It gives every Indian driver a guardian angel they never knew they needed.”

— Akhilesh Srivastava, President, ITS India Forum & Road Safety Ambassador IRF

The long road to this notification

The story of this gazette notification begins not in June 2026, but in the boardrooms, policy forums, and international conferences where Akhilesh Srivastava spent nearly three years patiently, persistently, and with an engineer’s precision making the case that India could not afford to wait. While the European Union had already deployed V2X across its motorway network, while Japan’s VICS system had been serving 50 million vehicles for three decades, and while the United States FCC finalized its C-V2X transition in its landmark Second Report and Order (FCC 24-106) in March 2026, India’s spectrum for connected vehicles remained locked behind licensing barriers that added cost, complexity, and delay to every deployment.

Akhilesh Srivastava saw the gap for what it was: not a technology gap, but a governance gap. India already had 100 million FASTag-equipped vehicles, millions of AIS-140 GPS trackers, and a growing fleet of BS-VI vehicles with OBD-II ports. What was missing was the wireless nervous system that would let them talk to each other and to the road. He set about building consensus across five dimensions simultaneously: regulatory (engaging DoT, WPC, TRAI, and the Ministry of Communications); technical (aligning with 3GPP C-V2X standards, NavIC positioning integration, and IEEE legacy interoperability); industry (convening OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, and telecom operators through ITS India Forum); policy (anchoring V2X in the Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety’s mandate and India’s WEF Road Safety 2.0 commitments); and international (positioning India in ISO TC 204 discussions and at the ITS World Congress).

His 2025 paper proposing a National AI-empowered ITS Middle Layer is now widely circulated among MoRTH, DoT, and NHAI leadership, specifically identifying 5.9 GHz spectrum de-licensing as the single most critical prerequisite for India’s connected vehicle future. That paper became a reference document in TRAI’s public consultation process, which opened in April 2026. Industry stakeholders, including COAI, SIAM, ARAI, and Qualcomm, submitted inputs by May 28; counter-comments closed June 11. The gazette notification was published the very next day — a testament to the quality of groundwork Srivastava had laid.

What C-V2X actually does — and why it matters for India

Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything is a 3GPP-standardized communication protocol operating in the PC5 sidelink interface (direct device-to-device, no cellular network required) and the Uu uplink interface (network-assisted). Operating in the newly de-licensed 5875–5905 MHz band, C-V2X-equipped vehicles and roadside units exchange safety messages at latencies below 10 milliseconds — roughly 50 times faster than a human can perceive a hazard and begin braking. The technology enables four communication pathways: V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle: collision warnings, emergency braking alerts, convoy management); V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure: signal phase and timing, speed advisories, variable speed limits from dynamic message signs); V2P (vehicle-to-pedestrian: protection for cyclists, two-wheelers, and schoolchildren via smartphone apps); and V2N (vehicle-to-network: cloud-based services, traffic management centre integration, police and ambulance coordination).

For India specifically, C-V2X is not a luxury — it is a necessity. 92% of India’s road accidents are caused by human error, according to MoRTH & TRAI’s own analysis. Nearly 60% are attributable to overspeeding; many more to distracted driving, fatigued commercial vehicle operators, and the unique complexity of India’s heterogeneous traffic — where a 40-tonne highway truck may share a lane with a bullock cart, a motorcycle, and a school van simultaneously. C-V2X’s ability to warn a driver about a hazard around a blind corner — before it is visible — directly addresses this reality in a way that no camera or sensor on the vehicle itself ever could. The United States Department of Transportation has estimated that V2X-enabled safety applications could eliminate or mitigate the severity of up to 80% of non-impaired multi-vehicle crashes — a figure that, applied to India’s 1,77,000 annual road fatalities, implies over 1,00,000 lives that technology could protect every year.

“What Akhilesh has done is not just advocate for a spectrum band. He has reframed the entire connected mobility conversation in India — from a technology question into a public health imperative. The gazette notification is the output. The real achievement is the shift in thinking that preceded it. This is the kind of leadership that changes policy.”

— Senior industry leader, automotive OEM ecosystem (on background)

What comes next — and Srivastava’s larger vision

The de-licensing of the 5875–5905 MHz band is the foundation, not the ceiling. Akhilesh Srivastava’s architectural vision — developed through ITS India Forum, IRF, and his ongoing collaboration with IIT Bombay & IIT Hyderabad calls for a phased national deployment: Phase 1 integrating C-V2X OBUs into all new AIS-140B compliant commercial vehicles, public transport buses, school vans etc; Phase 2 deploying Road Side Units (RSUs) at all 1,500+ National Highway toll plazas, blackspots and major junctions; and Phase 3 enabling full cooperative mobility, where India’s entire vehicle fleet, road infrastructure, emergency services, and traffic management centres operate as one unified, AI-powered nervous system.

This architecture — which Akhilesh Srivastava has christened the National AI-empowered Intelligent Transport System Middle Layer (NAITSMIL) — envisions a Road Safety Foundation Model (RoadGPT) that functions like ChatGPT for roads: ingesting data from every camera, sensor, LiDAR, radar, and connected vehicle on India’s 63 lakh km road network; reasoning in real time across all inputs; and triggering interventions — from automated e-challans to hospital dispatch to driver coaching in milliseconds. The gazette notification of June 10, 2026, is the first physical frequency that this architecture now occupies. It will not be the last.

The global V2X market — valued at under USD 1 billion in 2021 — is projected to reach USD 26.2 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 43.7%. India, with the world’s largest fleet of commercial vehicles and the highest road fatality burden among G20 nations, is not a latecomer to this market — it is, thanks in no small part to Akhilesh Srivastava’s advocacy, now positioned to be its largest and most consequential deployment.

“I have always believed that technology is not the constraint. The constraint is always institutional will and regulatory clarity. Once you solve those, technology follows naturally. With this notification, DoT has demonstrated exactly that institutional will. My gratitude goes to the entire team at MoRTH, DoT, WPC, TRAI, and all the industry partners who engaged in the consultation process, and a special thanks to the Honorable Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety, whose last-minute push made this possible. This is a collective achievement. I am merely its most stubborn advocate.”

— Akhilesh Srivastava, President, ITS India Forum

Industry stakeholders across the automotive, telecom, and road safety ecosystems have responded with unanimous enthusiasm, with many specifically acknowledging Akhilesh Srivastava’s role in making the notification possible. Leaders from SIAM, COAI, ARAI, and major OEMs congratulated him personally, noting that his persistence, across multiple governments, multiple regulatory cycles, and significant institutional inertia had made what once seemed like a distant aspiration into immediate reality.

As India enters the era of connected mobility, the Gazette Notification of June 10, 2026, will be remembered as the day the country’s roads began to speak. And the voice they speak in belongs, first and most persistently, to Akhilesh Srivastava.

About ITS India Forum: The Intelligent Transportation Systems Society of India — the apex body for ITS professionals, researchers, and industry stakeholders in India, affiliated with ITS International. Led by Akhilesh Srivastava as President.

Media inquiries: President@itsindiaforum.com | New Delhi