The Hindu Business Line : ISRO's success

IT MUST HAVE been with a sense of pride that the Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman, Mr Madhavan Nair, presented to the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, last week the first images beamed by Cartosat-1, the remote sensing satellite that was launched on May 5. Cartosat-1 is more special than the ten other remote sensing satellites that ISRO has sent up in the past. From 620 km up in the sky, its twin cameras can provide stereoscopic pictures of the earth with a resolution of 2.5 metres that will help generate three-dimensional digital maps for urban and rural development, disaster management and mapping water resources. Of course, European and American satellites can deliver images with finer resolution and in pseudo stereo, but ISRO claims its pictures are the first with real stereo capability.

Undoubtedly, the country's capabilities in space have demonstrably risen after the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle blasted off from the new launch pad at Sriharikota earlier this month and placed two satellites in orbit. The launch vehicle had delivered for the eighth time in a row, a record that does credit to ISRO and its mandate to develop indigenous capabilities to launch satellites for telecommunications, weather monitoring and remote sensing. The record turns more notable because the capability has been built without much international assistance, in fact, in spite of attempts by the United States to slow the pace. An index of the progress ISRO has made with the PSLV is that the 1.6-tonne Cartosat-1 satellite is twice as heavy as the payload the launcher was designed to handle when it made its debut ten years ago. Successhas come to ISRO only the hard way. Through a patch in the late 1980s, efforts to hoist satellites into space seemed to all fall apart. Three Satellite Launch Vehicles blazed away from the Sriharikota pad from 1979 through 1981 to post the experimental Rohini remote sensing satellites into low earth orbits. Only one succeeded. The next version of the launch vehicle, the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle, did no better. Two of three forays failed completely, managing to climb no more than 25 km into the sky; the third succeeded but partially, hoisting its payload about 435 km into space, yet well short of the required distance.

Having invested consistently in the space programme over several decades despite the ups and downs — the Budgetary outlay this year is over Rs 3,100 crore — the Government must now look forward to substantial commercial dividends. ISRO's international marketing arm reported revenues of Rs 370 crore in 2004-05, but the potential especially in the domestic market has not been fully tapped. Many of ISRO's products, especially the higher resolution imagery, are used exclusively by the Defence Ministry and are not available to the civilian market. But given that comparable European and American imagery are widely available, even to Indians, the restrictions on the sale of some ISRO products for civilian use are self-defeating. Not all images need be seen as having a national security implication to warrant this diffidence. ISRO must strive for a consensus with the Defence Ministry to allow greater public access to these images that could lead to the unlocking of the commercial potential in such ventures.

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