In the early 90s, the Indian defence forces decided to use GPS technology for their own operations. After evaluating the pros and cons of its suitability for defence purposes, they decided that GPS is a good technology they could make use of. I would say they took a good decision at that point of time. They also decided that the technology should be built locally in India for obvious reasons. DRDO and the then Department of Electronics, which is now the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, got together to initiate what they called a national project to design and build GPS receivers indigenously and exclusively for the armed forces. That was how we got into the picture. We presented our case to the government along with a few others most notably Bharat Electronics. At the end of this initial interaction, we got a sponsored project for the development of receivers. We spent three to four years in designing the same. It was a good experience for us given the rigorous requirements and quality specifications of the armed forces. We had the designs ready by 1996-97 and operations in terms of supply began in 1996 or so. Since then, it has been a happy experience with the defence forces. We regularly supply receivers to them for a variety of requirements primarily for navigation purposes.
We then realised that there are opportunities for GPS outside the defence market. It has several opportunities in a variety of sectors, verticals I would say, like transportation, healthcare, utilities and security. They needed GPS based solutions. Here was a kind of, I would not say shift in focus, but an added dimension to our activities. We began building GPS based solutions. This happened four, five years ago. We have been regularly supplying our solutions since then. Some of our solutions are related to vehicle tracking, timing, mapping, data logging and so on. These applications demand integrating GPS as a sensor. This can take place through a number of communication systems. In India, we have seen an explosion in mobile communications. So these applications involve interfacing a GPS sensor over mobile communications or satellite communications or over any proprietary radio etc. So we talk about all these things when we are talking about GPS based solutions.
There is another solution which is all about timing. GPS, in addition to the position, also gives accurate information about time. We can make good use of this information for several industrial applications. For example, let us say typically in a power sector, there is a large grid operation which requires accurate time synchronisation of various events before the power load can be dispatched to the utility sites. GPS has one interesting application there of synchronising the time of different events. Essentially using time stamp output of GPS drives a number of applications.

The challenges were essentially of three types. First of all, when we started, there were only a handful of people who knew what GPS was all about. We had to train a set of people by exposing them to some companies which were doing good quality work on GPS. So that was the challenge, to put together a team which understands GPS as a technology. The second challenge we faced was regarding quality. The military as we all know has stringent quality specifications. As an organisation, we were faced with this challenge in the very first instance. Besides the quality of the product, there were other requirements of the platforms on which GPS receivers were supposed to be mounted. The army had tanks of different versions, the airforce had a number of aircraft again of different versions and the navy too had a variety of aircraft. So we had to meet the platform specifications as well.
The third and last challenge we faced was that of production. Having completed a design and passed the quality test, we had to set up manufacturing operations. The numbers ran into thousands. To be able to produce these with the stipulated quality and within the given time-frame was a challenge indeed.
We now have a fourth challenge, which we did not have then. It is the cost. GPS is just a sensor. But because of its growing usage across the globe and India, the costs have come down drastically. So the cost of any product or solution built using GPS has to be competitive. And the market being what it is, flooded with diverse GPS solutions and products, we have to make sure that the product we build is quality effective and cost effective. We are meeting this challenge through cost optimisation in the design itself. We go through designs to check out what are the areas in which we can optimise the cost without compromising on quality. We also consider other things like how can we do component level integration, how can we reuse some of the components and how can we make good use of open platforms and so on to reduce the cost.