As India’s 5G deployment horizon keeps rolling back, the country’s communication minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has been floating the idea of accelerating development of indigenous 6G technologies and deploying them as soon as 2023 or early 2024, well ahead of other nations. This idea of leapfrogging a generation is hardly new and it was a former Indian communications minister Dayanidhi Maran who made almost a very similar suggestion about skipping 3G and moving straight to 4G, over 17 years ago in May 2004. That minister was rather ahead of his time there, and it took another six years until 2010 for the regulator, TRAI, to publish a paper suggesting the country leap straight from 2G to 4G, having initially virtually skipped…