When Cars Talk
Nope. Not a Disney movie.
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That’s how many people lost their lives to road crashes in 2023 in India. Another 4.63 lakh people had to deal with injuries due to road crashes. That’s roughly one death every three minutes, every single day of the year. And for all the seatbelt campaigns and drunk-driving crackdowns, the root cause barely changes. About 92% of these accidents trace back to human failure. A driver who looked away at the wrong moment, misjudged a gap, reacted a second too late, or was simply going too fast to stop in time.
The road safety problem is bad enough on its own. On top of that, the transport sector contributed around 10% of India’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, and you have a dual crisis, one measured in lives, the other in parts per million. Both are worsening as more vehicles hit India’s expanding road network, which now spans 67 lakh kilometres.
There is a technology that could address both problems simultaneously. It is called Vehicle-to-Everything communication (V2X), and the idea is elegantly simple. What if your car could talk to other cars, traffic signals, and the road itself, sharing real-time information about speed, direction, and hazards? Remove human error from the equation, and most accidents never happen. Optimise traffic flow, and emissions fall. The technology exists. The question is what India is doing about it.
That’s what we’ll find out today using the TRAI’s consultation paper on the Regulatory Framework for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communication.
What Has Happened So Far
V2X is not a new idea, but mass deployment is still a work in progress globally. The technology lets vehicles communicate via two primary modes. Directly with nearby vehicles and infrastructure using short-range radio (the PC5 sidelink interface), and via the wider cellular network for longer-range coordination. The globally harmonized frequency for this direct communication is the 5.9 GHz band, and most of the world has converged on Cellular V2X (C-V2X) as the preferred standard, given its ability to leverage existing 4G and 5G network infrastructure.
China is the furthest ahead. More than 90 Chinese cities have already partnered with wireless network operators to deploy roadside units (RSUs), and over 5,000 km of roads have been opened for V2X pilot demonstrations. By the end of 2023, over 2.7 lakh Chinese passenger cars, or roughly 1.2% of new vehicle sales, had C-V2X built in by factory. The country has a national target of having 50% of new vehicles C-V2X equipped, with 100% coverage of national highways by 2034.
The United States took a different, and longer path. The FCC spent more than two decades reserving 5.9 GHz spectrum for an older technology (DSRC) that never meaningfully deployed. In November 2024, it finally codified the shift to C-V2X in the same band, mandating a two-year sunset for legacy DSRC operations. South Korea officially dropped DSRC in December 2023 in favour of LTE-V2X. Japan has a structured national plan targeting 5.9 GHz frequency assignment by FY2026.
The global C-V2X market reflects this momentum. It was valued at $2.43 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $56.44 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of nearly 42%.
But V2X still faces three stubborn challenges anywhere it is deployed. First, there is the chicken-and-egg problem. The technology only delivers its full safety benefits at high penetration rates, but consumers have little reason to pay for it until the network effect kicks in. Second, the infrastructure cost is non-trivial. A single intersection equipped with C-V2X hardware costs around $6,000–$7,000, and a country-scale rollout requires hundreds of thousands of them. Third, and perhaps most underappreciated, is the cybersecurity problem. V2X messages directly influence driving decisions in real time. So, a spoofed collision warning or a suppressed emergency alert doesn’t just corrupt data, it could cause accidents. Building a trustworthy public key infrastructure that authenticates every vehicle and roadside unit without compromising user privacy is genuinely hard.
What Is India Doing?
Here is the unusual part. India has no V2X deployment to speak of today. There are no legacy V2X implementations in the country, which is actually an advantage. There’s no compatibility baggage to carry forward. Yet the regulatory machinery is already moving, and that matters enormously, because spectrum policy and licensing frameworks are the bedrock on which any technology deployment eventually stands.
In December 2025, the Department of Telecommunications formally asked TRAI to recommend a regulatory framework for V2X. TRAI published its consultation paper on April 30, 2026, and the document reveals the shape of India’s planned approach.
The technology choice was made early. India has settled on C-V2X as its harmonized ITS standard, bypassing the DSRC debate entirely. The spectrum plan carves the 5875–5905 MHz band (30 MHz) for initial C-V2X deployment, with the remaining 5905–5925 MHz (20 MHz) held in reserve for future applications. India’s National Frequency Allocation Plan 2025 has already tagged this band for V2X use.
On the hardware side, the regulatory design distinguishes between two types of equipment. On-Board Units, or the devices fitted inside vehicles, would be license-exempt under defined technical conditions, much like how Wi-Fi routers don’t need individual spectrum licenses. Roadside Units, or the fixed infrastructure at intersections and along highways, would require authorisation, to ensure interference is managed as the network scales up.
The consultation paper also examines cybersecurity in detail. India needs a Public Key Infrastructure framework for V2X, which is essentially a trusted certificate chain that allows vehicles and RSUs to verify each other’s identity without revealing the vehicle owner’s location over time. The paper asks who should run this Root Certificate Authority. The Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) under MeitY, or another body. It is the kind of question that sounds technical until you realise that the answer will determine whether every connected vehicle in India can be tracked by whoever controls that certificate infrastructure.
There are also calls to start small and learn fast. The Task Force convened by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has recommended pilot projects in urban centres and select national highways before any pan-India rollout. That’s a sensible idea, given that India’s mixed traffic conditions (motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, cattle on highways) are unlike anything the technology has been tested in.
The Takeaway
India is not building V2X. It is building the rules for V2X. That is not the same thing, but it matters more than it sounds. The countries that got the regulatory framework right early, like China, and the US, are the ones setting the deployment pace today. The countries that delayed spectrum allocation (like the US with DSRC) lost two decades.
Getting the spectrum, licensing, and security architecture right before the first commercial vehicles roll out is exactly the right sequence. The real test will come when those frameworks need to be translated into physical infrastructure like roadside units, testing protocols, and certification standards at a scale that matches India’s 67-lakh-kilometre road network.
For a country that loses 1.73 lakh lives on its roads every year, mostly because of human mistakes that a connected vehicle could catch in milliseconds, the urgency is not abstract. The cars are not talking yet. But at least someone is building the grammar.
Until next time, ReadOn!