DoT Showcases Telecom-Powered Mobility Digital Twin for Smarter Transport Planning
DoT Showcases Telecom-Powered Mobility Digital Twin for Smarter Transport Planning
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) showcased its pioneering Digital Twin with AI-Driven Insights Initiativerecently at India Mobile Congress 2025, demonstrating how the convergence of telecom, computation, and sensing can transform the way India plans and manages infrastructure. The initiative seeks to help planners see clearly, know the present, simulate the future, and shape outcomes — enabling confident assessment of utility and impact before plans are finalised.
Round Table Chief Guest and Panelists
From Left to Right: Shri. Sagar Mathur, Bharti Airtel;Shri. Rahul Joshi, RJIL;Shri. Asit Kadayan, DDG (Digital Twin Unit), DoT;Shri R. N. Palai, Member (Technology) DoT;Shri Sunil Bajpai (former Additional Member, Railway Board; ex-Principal Advisor, TRAI); Shri. Shri S. T. Abbas, Sr. DDG (TEC);Dr. Amit Kumar Jain, DMRC;Dr. Simone Redana, Nokia, Germany; Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya, C-DEP
Digital Twin Exhibit Draws Wide Engagement
The DoT Digital Twin exhibit, displayed across the four-day IMC-2025 attracted strong engagement from policymakers, planners, AI/ML experts, and innovators. Developed in collaboration with leading telecom operators and OEMs such as M/s RJIL, M/s Bharti Airtel, M/s Nokia etc, the demonstrations highlighted three key use cases:
Analysis from corridors such as Vasant Kunj and Central Vistain New Delhi revealed authentic commute patterns and dwelling hotspots, enabling metro and transport agencies to understand travel behaviour, assess station catchment areas, and plan investments with greater confidence and precision.
These observations revealed movement patterns across multiple transport modes—whether direct visits to pilgrimage sites or part of wider tourism circuits—helping planners understand travel behaviour and improve tourism infrastructure and services at destinations and along connecting corridors.
The system illustrated how a green corridor for special vehicles can be dynamically created—reducing delay for priority movement while minimising disruption to regular traffic—showcasing the potential of telecom-powered connected systems to deliver real-time, intelligent traffic coordination.
Together, these demonstrations embodied the core vision of DoT’s Sangam Digital Twin Initiative — to unlock planning intelligence by activating existing data at source in a privacy-preserving, AI-enabled manner. The initiative highlights how telecom’s ubiquity can support continuous, data-driven foresight, beginning with the transport sector, where clarity can de-risk large infrastructure projects.
Shri Tarun Kapoor, Advisor to the Prime Minister, along with Dr. Neeraj Mittal, Secretary (Telecom), interacts with the DoT team at IMC 2025 while exploring live demonstrations of the Mobility Digital Twin.
Roundtable on “Planning That Thinks Ahead”
DoT also hosted a high-level Roundtable on “Planning That Thinks Ahead” to deliberate on the economics of clarity in public infrastructure.
The session was chaired by Shri R. N. Palai, Member (Technology), Digital Communications Commission; graced by Shri S. T. Abbas, Sr. DDG (TEC); and moderated by Shri Sunil Bajpai (former Additional Member, Railway Board; ex-Principal Advisor, TRAI).
Panelists included Dr. Simone Redana (Nokia, Germany), Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya (C-DEP), Dr. Amit Kumar Jain (DMRC), Mr. Rahul Joshi (RJIL), Mr. Sagar Mathur (Bharti Airtel), and Mr. Asit Kadayan (DoT).
Discussions underscored that technology and data already exist — the time to act is now. Panelists emphasised the vast potential of telecom infrastructure and mobility insights to strengthen state capability for evidence-based, agile, and continuous planning. Three priorities emerged for accelerating progress:
Building the Foundation for Institutionalising the Practice
Under the Sangam Initiative, DoT is developing a Regulatory-cum-Innovation Sandbox to co-create AI models, data frameworks, and digital twin toolkits in partnership with industry, academia, and domain experts. This ecosystem will ensure secure, interoperable, and incentive-aligned co-development, paving the way for institutionalised, data-driven planning.
DoT and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) are already collaborating through an Inter-Ministerial Joint Working Group (JWG) to leverage telecom mobility insights and digital twin technologies for transforming urban mobility planning — marking the beginning of a new phase of cross-sectoral innovation and implementation.DoT is also actively engagingwith leading academic institutions such as IISc, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras and transport agencies like DMRC, and CUMTA Chennai to advance Digital Twin applications in transport and urban infrastructure.
The IMC 2025 showcase marks a key step toward telecom-powered Digital Twins becoming a core of agile, citizen-led, and data-driven infrastructure planning — a vision that knows the present, simulates the future, and shapes the outcome.
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- Urban Mobility Insights from Telecom Data – Demonstrations illustrated how telecom mobility data can produce high-quality, near real-time origination–destination (OD) insights for urban transport planning.