On August 15th, India celebrated its 78th Independence Day. Although India achieved independence in 1947, many believe that it became truly free in 1991. It was in that year that India entered a new era by adopting the policy of liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) that broke the shackles it had imposed on its economy and entrepreneurship by following the socialistic model of growth.
However, although industry has been freed from many state controls, the space and defence production sectors continued to be highly regulated.
The entry of the private sector into space marks a significant step for the government and has created an opportunity that private enterprise had waited for so long. More important is the use of space technology and its application in myriad fields of governance that impact the life of the common man.
Even though India’s space research programme started in 1969, the year the US landed the first man on the moon, it was only last year that India caught up with the space-faring nations when Chandrayaan-3 made a historic touchdown in the south polar region of the moon where nobody had landed before.
A representation of Chandrayaan-3, along with the lunar lander and rover, that successfully landed on the moon on August 22nd 2023.
The government targets a five-fold increase in its share of the global space economy, and this quantum leap has become possible only after the government decided to “unlock” this sector from the “veil of secrecy”, as stated by Dr Jitendra Singh, the union minister of state for science and technology, atomic energy and space, while launching the technical centre of IN-SPACe in Ahmedabad a few months ago. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) was created to support private sector participation in space activities. The minister said the India government had “broken taboos of the past by opening the space sector to public-private participation”.
The Indian Space Policy 2023 enables end-to-end participation of non-governmental entities (NGEs) in the entire domain of space activities. Many schemes to encourage and hand-hold the private sector have been announced and implemented by IN-SPACe, e.g., the seed fund scheme, pricing support policy, mentorship support, Design Lab for NGEs, skills development in the space sector, Isro facility utilization support, and technology transfer to NGEs.
Growing space economy
IN-SPACe has signed around 45 memorandums of agreement with NGEs to provide the support for the realization of space systems and applications, including increasing the industry’s participation in the manufacture of launch vehicles and satellites. Several industry associations related to the space sector, notably the Indian Space Association (ISpA), have been formed.
India’s space missions are designed to be cost-effective, building upon human resources and skills. Even though talent was never lacking in the country, the missing link was the enabling milieu, which was finally created by the present government.
With the opening up of the space sector, India targets a five-fold increase in its share of the global space economy. India’s space economy today stands at a modest US$8 billion, and according to the recent ADL (Arthur D Little) Report on India, it could have the potential to become US$100 billion by 2040. A few years back, India had just a few start-ups in the space sector, but with the opening up of the sector, their number has grown to nearly 200 with several earlier ones scaling up to turn into full-fledged entrepreneurs. In FY 24, private space start-ups investment crossed Rs 1,000 crores (US$120 million). The government has also hiked the space budget several times, increasing it by 142% over a decade.
The government foresees growing synergy between research, academia, start-ups and industry. It has set up the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to promote the public-private partnership (PPP) model in scientific research. The ANRF budget envisions a funding of Rs 50,000 crores or about US$6 billion over five years, out of which about 60-70% is to come from non-government sources as per government estimates. The ANRF envisions the integration of the public and private sectors to provide a strategic direction to scientific research as envisaged in the National Education Policy 2020.
Another interesting development is the increasing use of Indian space facilities by foreign players, with 389 foreign satellites launched in the last nine years out of 424 launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) since 1990s, earning US$157 million out of the US$174 million earned so far from the launching of foreign satellites. The scale and the speed have gone up.
Besides offering a cost-effective alternative for launching foreign satellites, another remarkable feature of India’s space technology is that it touches the common man’s life, with application of space technology in different sectors such as disaster management, Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA), the PM Gati Shakti national master plan, infrastructure such as railways, highways and smart cities, agriculture, water mapping, telemedicine and robotic surgery.
In the last few years space-based applications/services have grown more than anticipated amid increasing demands and requirements, that too with huge commercial potential. The government is encouraging private companies to take advantage of the opportunities to diffuse space technology and boost space economy.
International cooperation
ISRO is at the forefront of reforms in the country’s space activities. It proposes to change the approach from a “supply-based” to a “demand-based” model” through the New Space India Limited (NSIL), to act as the aggregator of user requirements, obtain commitments and commercialize launches, satellites and services. India’s maiden mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-1, is an example of international cooperation with its international payloads. According to ISRO, this paved the way for the ISRO-NASA joint discovery of water molecules on the moon surface, unattained by any of the previous missions of such nature. Earlier, there was the Indo-French joint satellite mission Megha-Tropiques for studying tropical atmospheres, the data from which was made available to the international scientific community.
Saral (Satellite for Altika and Argos), another joint mission with France for studying the ocean from space using altimetry, was also launched some time back. ISRO and NASA are realizing a joint satellite mission called Nisar (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) for earth science studies. A feasibility study for an earth observation satellite mission with thermal infrared imager, named Trishna, has been completed by ISRO and CNES as part of the Indo-French cooperation. ISRO is exploring cooperation opportunities in astronaut training, life support systems, and radiation shielding solutions with countries and space agencies that have the expertise in human space flight as part of ISRO’s Gaganyaan programme. This will carry forward ISRO’s own capacity building programme on nano satellite development, called Unnati (UNispace Nanosatellite Assembly & Training by ISRO).
Space technology can contribute significantly to the process of planning and evaluation, assisting planners, policymakers and administrators in several ways. I recall using satellite technology to monitor the growth in the survival of trees to assess the impact of the afforestation programme. The increase or loss of the forest area could be easily observed through satellites, unlike before when the task relied entirely on a manual system that is highly unreliable and sometimes arbitrary. Infrastructure planning in rural and urban areas has also benefited immensely from data obtained from earth observation satellites. Various applications on the ground, including for agriculture, mining, water management, road traffic management, vegetation structure mapping, as well as monitoring of air quality, farm and forest fires, forest cover, landslides, melting of glaciers, traffic erosion of coast lines, oil spills, and safety of beaches for tourism have all helped the system immeasurably, including in planning for climate action.
Finally, in an agrarian economy like India where the majority of land holdings are small and getting increasingly fragmented, space technology is being used for proper demarcation of farmers’ fields, thereby protecting their rights and providing them a sense of security. Aerial Services and Digital Mapping (ASDM) services provide large-scale topographic maps and very-high-resolution digital terrain models (DTM) for highly flood-prone river reaches in India, and for 2D/3D mapping in urban areas. The imagery obtained from unmanned aerial vehicles has been used in many applications ranging from large-scale mapping to disaster assessment.
When India’s space programme started soon after India gained independence, rockets were carried on bicycles and animal-drawn carts to their launch stations. What at one time seemed remote has now begun to affect ordinary lives. When the common man now looks at the sky, he is not gazing at the stars or the blazing sun, he is not simply yearning for the moon. He is trying to spot the unseen satellites that influence his life. If one could twist Shakespeare, one might as well say that the fault is not in our satellites, but in ourselves that we didn’t launch them earlier and use them well.
Top photo: India with city lights as viewed from space.
