Chandrayaan-3’s success will have a huge impact on industrial ecosystem: Sitharaman

New Delhi, Sep 20: The successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the lunar south pole is going to have a very big impact on India’s industrial and technological ecosystem, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Wednesday.
She said the country’s space journey has been “spectacular” since starting in 1975 with the launch of the Aryabhatta Satellite with the help of the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Now, the Indian Space Research Organisation also launches foreign satellites, she added.
Participating in a debate in Rajya Sabha on ‘India’s Glorious Space Journey Marked By Successful Soft Landing of Chandrayaan-3’, the finance minister said, “This success of Chandrayaan-3 is certainly going to have a very big impact on India’s industrial and technological ecosystem.” It is going to have a positive impact on satellite system, telecommunications and many other related fields, she added.
The ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission was not a racing expedition to reach the Moon faster than somebody else but to land there in a cost-effective manner using lesser fuel and thus serve the purpose of sustainability, she said.
“The Modi government’s policies have helped the power of youth, the power of the scientific community, and the power of Indian startups come together which are in turn helping the ISRO in a big way. There are now more than 140 Space-Tech startups in the country, all of whom are doing brilliant work,” she said. She also lauded the ISRO’s previous lunar missions Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2 and said they made extraordinary contributions to space science.
Responding to Congress MP Jairam Ramesh’s remark earlier in the day that the Indian space programme should not be looked as “an instrument of muscular nationalism”, she said the prime minister stood with the scientists not only during the success of Chandrayaan-3 but during the failure of Chandrayaan-2.
“This was a bit of perversion which I think somebody from Jairam Ramesh’s experience, I would not expect,” she said.
Scientists are given due credit and would be given also in future, she said, adding every government has done it and the present government has done it too.
Sitharaman further said the huge participation of women in the mission shows that the glass ceiling has been broken at the ISRO for quite some time and this empowerment shows that in India there is enough opportunity for them.
“Over 100 women have played a direct significant role in conceptualising, designing, realising, testing and executing Chandrayaan 3. Therefore, naming Chandrayaan-3 landing site on the Moon ‘Shiv Shakti’ is a tribute to the women scientists who worked on that mission,” she said. (PTI)