Starlink has had its Indian licence since June 2025. As of late October, sixteen months on, it still can’t sell anyone a connection. 

The latest hold-up, if Bloomberg’s June report is right, is the Home Ministry, which has been sitting on the final security clearance since Starlink dishes turned up in the Iran war, in a country where Starlink was never licensed. Starlink calls that report misleading and says it has built a deployment model tailored for India. In early October, Elon Musk lost patience in public and blamed Mukesh Ambani. The Narendra Modi government says it is simply following process.

While one camp considers Starlink a foreign threat to be kept out, the other thinks every week of delay means villages are kept offline for a tycoon’s benefit. 

Since the back-and-forth in the public square is bereft of context or nuance, this piece tries to provide that missing link. Its central point is simple: an Indian licence gives India a handle on the parts of Starlink that physically sit in India, but not on the satellites overhead or the software that decides whose dish works.

Territorial licences don’t restrict ability

It helps to picture Starlink in four parts. There are the satellites, several thousand of them a few hundred kilometres up, which pass over India whether anyone here likes it or not. There's the dish on the customer’s roof, a flat panel that steers its beam electronically to follow them across the sky. There are the gateways, ground stations that connect the satellites to the ordinary internet. And then there’s the part nobody mentions at press conferences: the network management software in SpaceX’s operations centres, which authenticates every dish, hands out capacity, and decides which parts of the map get service at all.

Older satellite broadband was what engineers call bent-pipe. The satellite was little more than a mirror, bouncing your signal down to a gateway somewhere underneath it. Newer Starlink satellites also pass traffic to one another over laser links, so a signal from a dish in Ladakh can hop across several satellites before coming down at a gateway on another continent. This ability to bounce packets between satellites adds a layer of complexity. Where your traffic leaves the network is now a routing decision made in software rather than a fact of geography.

The Starlink network management system then is the nerve centre of the entire operation with the ability to switch service on and off for any stretch of territory, control how packets are routed and even knowing the GPS locations of the user terminals. And this ability is not limited by any territorial licences.

That’s how dishes smuggled into Iran could work with no Iranian licence. SpaceX turned on coverage there in 2022 with Washington’s approval. Tehran wasn’t asked, and couldn’t have stopped it if it had been.

What India’s licence actually covers

If a licence can’t control the operation of either the satellites or the software, the obvious question is what is its purpose/ambit. 

A licence is what allows an operator to sell services legally in a country, and every country attaches its own conditions. In India, the licence is only the first step: an operator must also clear security checks and receive spectrum before it can switch on commercial service. 

In fairness to the Department of Telecommunications, India’s rules are tougher than most. The security conditions issued in May 2025 require lawful interception at Indian gateways, real-time proof that no Indian traffic is being routed through a gateway abroad, and blocking of the same websites that are already banned on Indian mobile networks. Operators also have to set up 50 km monitoring zones along the land borders and the coast, cut off any dish that wanders into a barred area, and run their network operation centres from within India.

Under these conditions, every legal dish in the country belongs to a known customer. Its traffic passes through Indian gateways, and its whereabouts near a border are watched. Starlink dishes have already been recovered from insurgents in Manipur and from drug smugglers off the Andamans. 

With a licensed service, Indian agencies at least have a trail to follow. Without one, they are relying on SpaceX’s choice to keep its beams switched off over India, which it says it does. 

That doesn’t mean a licence changes nothing. 

In fact, in normal times it changes almost everything. SpaceX wants the Indian market, and the licence is how India sets the terms for selling here. What a licence can’t do is guarantee how those terms hold in an extraordinary situation, if SpaceX, or a US government leaning on it, decides otherwise. Iran was that kind of situation. 

And whether traffic really stays on Indian gateways is, in the end, something India checks by audit. Nothing in physics guarantees it.

What the government is saying

The government’s main line is that this isn’t about any one company. On October 8, Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia pointed out that three firms hold satcom licences, Starlink, Jio’s satellite arm and Eutelsat OneWeb, and that none of them has security clearance yet. His deputy, Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, said the file is now with the Home Ministry and that the matter has “nothing to do with one company”.

On this point, the government is right: Jio isn’t being waved through while Starlink waits outside. But identical rules can still hit companies very differently. One of the reported conditions bars traffic from moving between satellites. For a bent-pipe system that costs almost nothing. For Starlink, whose newer satellites are built around those laser links, it rules out a core part of the design. Calling a rule “technology agnostic” doesn’t make it so.

The security argument deserves to be taken seriously. But it doesn’t necessarily support the government’s conclusion. What Iran demonstrated is that SpaceX can light up service over a country without that country’s permission. Refusing Starlink clearance does nothing about that. If anything, it leaves India with less visibility over the grey-market dishes already in circulation, and no legal leverage over SpaceX if something goes wrong.

Transparency is another problem. The government has never confirmed or denied the Iran report, and after roughly four years of Starlink being in the process, it still won’t give a timeline for the Home Ministry’s review. A spectrum charge of 5 percent of revenue cleared the Digital Communications Commission in September and is still waiting on the Cabinet. There are good reasons a security review can’t be conducted in public, but the criteria and its timeline could be. 

When a decision is both slow and opaque, people will fill the gap with their own theories, and that is exactly what has transpired.

What Musk is saying

Musk’s October 8 post asked why Starlink, licensed in over 165 countries, still had “no license” in India. In fact, Starlink already holds an Indian licence. Starlink got its satcom licence in June 2025 and its space authorisation a month later. What it doesn’t have is security clearance, a final spectrum assignment and approval for its foreign investment. Holding licences in Brazil or Kenya has no bearing on whether it meets India’s conditions, which are stricter than most.

He also said Starlink had spent five years complying with every Indian law. Nobody outside SpaceX and the Home Ministry can check that. The record isn’t spotless, either. Back in 2021 Starlink started taking Indian pre-orders before it had any licence at all, and the government made it stop and refund the deposits. More importantly, the conditions India cares most about, like keeping traffic on Indian gateways, are things Starlink controls and India can only audit. 

Starlink’s word that it complies is precisely what the security review is meant to verify.

Starlink executive Lauren Dreyer has said at the India Mobile Congress on October 7, that the company has built 20 gateways in India and will store Indian users' data here. That's plausible, and it addresses the data questions, but it doesn't address the control question. The concern raised by the Iran episode is not where Indian data is stored, but who can switch service in India on or off, and under whose authority.

Then came the Ambani turn. Over three days Musk went from unnamed “oligarchs” protecting a monopoly to a mock open letter addressed to “Prime Minister Ambani”. The motive he is pointing to isn’t imaginary. Reliance has its own satellite venture, a very large mobile business to protect, and it lobbied hard for spectrum auctions. But on the decisions that actually mattered, things went Musk’s way. The government rejected auctions and went with administrative allocation, which is what Starlink wanted. And in March 2025,  Jio signed up as one of Starlink’s two Indian distributors, which would be a strange thing to do if you were trying to strangle it.

The Ambani response to this controversy has been interesting. Reliance stayed silent initially, then issued one measured statement, on October 16. It said it welcomed competition from Starlink in India’s satellite internet market. It was Reliance’s first public response to more than a week of attacks by Musk, and came five days before Jio Platforms opened India’s largest-ever IPO, a Rs 30,213 crore (about $3.5 billion) issue, on October 21, 2026.  The core line was that “Jio’s own satellite services await clearances”. It didn’t name Musk, saying only that it was addressing “recent remarks about Reliance and the Indian market” to “place the facts on record.” 

Starlink said the same day that it was “ready to connect India”, and Musk answered Reliance with a “Much appreciated”, a noticeably softer tone than the previous week’s.

Musk’s outburst started with a post pointing out that 11,256 Indian villages still lacked 4G as of May 2026. That gap exists, and satellites are a sensible way to help close it. But Starlink is a premium service, priced well above what most rural families spend on mobile data. Musk is promising to price their services affordably in India. Starlink has done this elsewhere: in Kenya it was priced at $10 a month, against $120 in the US. But until Indian prices are announced, affordability remains a promise.

So what should India do?

A billionaire’s outbursts on X are no reason to rush a national security review, and bending to them would only invite the next round of pressure. 

The Home Ministry can keep its deliberations confidential and still publish what Starlink and the others must demonstrate, and by when. Any clearance should come with biting obligations. For example, advance notice before SpaceX changes service over Indian territory, independent audits of where traffic is actually routed, and penalties India can realistically enforce.

It also argues for being careful about who relies on it. Rural schools, health centres, fishing boats and disaster response teams should have access. There should be no dependence on Starlink for the armed forces and critical infrastructure. Having several providers helps, and OneWeb, Jio’s satellite venture and Amazon’s Kuiper are all in the queue. They should be cleared on the same clock.

In the long run, the only real solution is a slow and expensive one. If India wants a network that nobody else can switch off, it will have to build one, at least for government and defence use. The country has the launch vehicles and the engineers. 

Until that happens, every argument about satellite internet will keep coming back to the same uncomfortable fact: the satellite networks serving India are controlled from outside the country.

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