The Indian space agency known for its frugal innovations and cutting edge technology is also a very safe harbour for investment. A new report suggests that for every rupee spent on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the return on investment has been of the order of 2.54. Financial experts call that an "amazing" rate of return.
"ISRO has indeed touched the lives of every Indian, poor or rich alike," ISRO Chairman Dr S Somanath told NDTV. "The investment made in the space programme has immensely benefited the society, just the economic impact of money spent in space in India has been 2.5 times the investment," he said.
A new report 'Socio-Economic Impact Analysis of Indian Space Programme' prepared by the European space consulting giant Novaspace, headquartered in Paris, suggests that cumulatively over the last decade the Indian space sector has stimulated the national economy to the tune of $60 billion, supported 4.7 million jobs, and boosted public funds to the tune of $24 billion in tax revenues.
This is a first-of-a-kind study commissioned by ISRO, and Novaspace won the contract to do the study in a closely fought global tendering process. In fact some of the handicaps of the report stem from the fact that the European consultants did not fully internalise the deep penetration of space technology in the informal sectors of India's hinterland.
The new report released on the first National Space Day suggests that the gross value added by the Indian space sector between 2014 and 2023 was $60 billion, and in the next 10 years it can go up to $89 billion to $131 billion depending on the forecasting scenarios.
"Satellite-based applications are part of the daily lives of Indian citizens and have profoundly impacted the social fabric of the nation," the report said.
"India has achieved hugely in space," said Steve Bochinger, the lead expert at Novaspace. The total investment in ISRO till date in the last 55 years since its inception is less than a single year's budget of the American space agency NASA, he said.
ISRO's current annual budget is about $1.6 billion and NASA's current annual budget is $25 billion, which is about 15.5 times larger than India's spending on space.
As per last estimates by ISRO, since the beginning of the Indian space era, a total of 127 Indian satellites, including those from private operators and academic institutions, have been launched till December 31, 2023.
The number of operational satellites owned by the Indian government is 22 in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and 29 in GEO (Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit). In addition, three Indian deep space missions were also active by the end of 2023, namely Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, Aditya-L1, and the Propulsion Module of Chandrayaan-3.
India has launched 97 rockets and orbited 432 foreign satellites. It has three different rockets available for commercial hiring.
With over 50 satellites in the Indian constellation with an estimated worth of about Rs 50,000 crore, these help India in an amazingly diverse sectors such as weather forecasting, monitoring cyclones, helping in cash disbursement at automated teller machines (ATMs), crop forecasting, smart city planning, communications and navigation.
The Novaspace report said ISRO helps 8 lakh fisher folk daily. In addition, 1.4 billion Indians get the benefit of satellite-based weather forecasts.
On top of all this, India's wide array of sophisticated spy satellites sends a shiver down the country's western and eastern adversaries by constantly - day or night, hail or rain - looking down into enemy territory, even reading number plates of cars parked in the Islamabad compound of the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
India's spy satellites with 25 centimetre resolution are among the best in the world.
On the inter-planetary exploration front, India created history by capturing the orbit of the Moon and Mars in its first attempts - a feat not achieved by any other nation. India also soft-landed against all odds the Chandrayaan-3 mission's lander Vikram near the Moon's unexplored South Pole. India is at present studying the Sun 24x7 through the Aditya L-1 satellite.
But most significantly, India's Chandrayaan-1 in 2009 helped rewrite global lunar geological history by discovering the presence of water molecules on the parched surface of the Moon, opening up tantalising possibilities of setting up a lunar village. Some even suggest the US' ambitious '21 st century back-to-the-Moon' effort through the Artemis Programme was in a way inspired by the success of India's Chandrayaan-1 mission.
The Novaspace report said 80 million people watched the Chandrayaan-3 landing on YouTube, and called it "a remarkable national achievement". Novaspace said 48.5 terabytes of data have been made public by ISRO through its Chandrayaan-2 and Astrosat satellite missions.
Today, almost every time one withdraws money from an ATM, the secure connectivity is provided through an Indian satellite. Even the Rs 2,000 currency note has the Mangalyaan printed on it.
ISRO has also saved countless lives. Before the advent of Indian weather monitoring satellites, cyclones used to take a huge toll. The 1970 cyclone which hit eastern India killed over 3 lakh people. Now with satellites providing accurate cyclone-tracking, the loss of lives has dropped to double digits.
"One cannot even fathom how to monetise this saving of lives," said the ISRO chief Dr Somnath.
ISRO's journey that started from a tiny church in a coconut fringed village of Thumba on the coast of Kerala, launching a 715 kg imported Nike Apache rocket in 1963, to now rocketing the swadeshi Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM-3) weighing 6,40,000 kilograms - nearly a 900-fold jump that too in this closely-guarded rocket science domain - is a remarkable journey.
Truly a quantum jump from a fishing hamlet to the Red Planet, as ISRO often asserts, even the investments have paid off profitably in this high-risk sector.
