Musk’s Starshield throttling highlights India’s reliance on foreign satellite and cloud services

What Happened

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has throttled the military‑grade Starshield network that supplies Ukraine, a move that follows a similar 2022 incident. The action warns countries like India that foreign operators can cut or limit services at will. India has so far blocked Starlink’s entry. The government has licensed three satellite‑broadband players – Starlink, the Indian arm of Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio Satellite Communications – but none have received the required security clearance as of 16 Oct 2026. Eutelsat OneWeb is owned 29.65% by France, 10.89% by Britain and 17.88% by Bharti Space; Bharti Airtel also holds 26% of its Indian subsidiary. Jio Platforms and Luxembourg‑based SES formed a joint venture in 2022 giving Jio a 51% stake, yet Jio does not control the network. India’s NavIC positioning system is incomplete: only three of the required four satellites are operational, as admitted by Space Minister Jitendra Singh on 29 July. The country’s cloud landscape is dominated by U.S. providers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with Gartner projecting $17.5 billion cloud spend in 2026. The government runs the MeghRaj cloud for 2,170 ministries but still relies on foreign‑managed services like AWS Outposts, which need a link to AWS’s regional control system. Payments via UPI are largely independent of Visa and Mastercard, but the consumer apps are run by Google Pay and PhonePe, the latter backed by Walmart.

Context

Dependence on foreign satellite, cloud and payment platforms means Indian services can be disrupted by external policy moves or corporate decisions, even when contracts comply with Indian law.