Finally Chandrayaan2 has taken flight and the world watched in awe as India makes this giant leap in space technology. For the first time all top media houses reported the news with many making it their headline news. The credit for this success goes to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) which has been working with single-minded dedication, silently yet steadily to make a place for India among the superpowers of the world. Indians across the world too have been upbeat about the success of Chandrayaan2. In many ways this mission has managed to unite a discordant nation whose diverse population can hardly see eye to eye on any issue.
ISRO chief K Sivan thanked his team for the successful launch of Chandrayaan after an aborted mission last week. The team worked round the clock to avoid last minute glitches. Such excellent team work and space engineering is sure to fire up the imagination of several aspiring space scientists in this country. The ambition in many young Indian scientists is to finally land up at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) USA, which is considered the ultimate in space research technology. Now perhaps they will reconsider and stay back in their country to add value to its space research programmes. It is a fact that the USA is a great place for all forms of exploratory research but India too must join this race and refurbish its research institutions so as to attract the best human resource. That’s what a successful nation does!
True there are many subject matters of concern that need to be taken up in this country of 1.3 billion people with a huge chunk of its population living in stark poverty, without access to basic health care and sanitation and some even dying of starvation. At the root of these problems lie an insensitive bureaucracy and an incompetent public delivery system. It is true that food grains rot in the Food Corporation of India godowns because of some breakdown in the distribution system. These impediments to smooth public service delivery need to be plugged and taken seriously. ISRO has proven that if the Indian workforce takes things seriously and wishes to deliver it can do so without a glitch.
While there is a certain sense of anxiety that India has misplaced priorities and that launching a space mission when basic problems on its earth are crying out for solutions, this is to be expected in a noisy democracy where people believe that the very purpose of democracy is to have a million dissenting voices speak out their angst. Perhaps this ambition of aspiring for excellence is what will help strengthen the other areas of India’s development which are still lagging behind.