Ten to 20 imported telecom network technologies should give way to locally designed and manufactured alternatives, India's Minister of State for Communications Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani told the India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2026, framing the substitution list as a national priority.

The minister asked the industry to identify which imported products can realistically be replaced with Indian-made equivalents. The 10 to 20 figure covers a range wide enough to span most of an operator network stack, from radio access and optical transport to core, routing and security layers.

What did the minister ask for?

Pemmasani asked domestic telecom equipment makers and operators to build a shortlist of substitutable product categories and commit to local manufacturing. The substitution push sits inside the broader Atmanirbhar Bharat framework that New Delhi adopted in 2020, under which the government has tied parts of its telecom capital spending to domestic content thresholds and steered state-owned BSNL and MTNL toward locally made gear.

Indian operators buy from a familiar international shortlist: Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, Samsung and Cisco supply radio, core, transport and routing products to Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL. Replacing 10 to 20 imported product categories would touch a sizable share of that equipment base.

Which Indian vendors are positioned to respond?

Two names have shipped Indian-made telecom gear at scale in narrow product categories: state-backed Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) and Bengaluru-based Tejas Networks, the optical transport vendor now owned by the Tata group. Both have a track record of operator wins in India, though neither has yet displaced international vendors in the radio access segment at meaningful volume.

VVDN Technologies, HFCL and Sterlite Technologies have drawn government attention as domestic hardware manufacturers with relevant product lines. India's production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme has so far rewarded handset assembly more than telecom network equipment, leaving network hardware as the harder substitution target.

How does this connect to 5G and 6G?

The call lands as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel complete most of their 5G coverage targets and start scoping 6G work. Standards bodies adopted the IMT-2030 framework at the World Radiocommunication Conference in late 2023, and 3GPP has begun work on Release 20. Any Indian-made alternative would need to align with these roadmaps to win operator contracts in the next procurement cycle.

Domestic radio access equipment has so far lagged international suppliers on advanced 5G features. Jio's earlier push for an indigenous 5G solution, working with Radisys and others, has yet to translate into commercial RAN contracts at scale. Pemmasani's request signals the government's view that the gap needs closing faster.

What comes next?

The ministry did not publish a target date or a financial envelope. Past Indian telecom equipment programs have run on three- to six-year horizons, with design wins, lab trials and operator certification typically preceding volume orders. BSNL's recent 4G saturation project, which leaned on a mix of local and imported vendors, illustrates how slowly the substitution can move once tenders are issued.

IMC 2026 runs for three days and regularly draws tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors. The conference floor will show over that period whether Indian vendors respond with project pipelines or repeat familiar pledges.