Not enough toilets? Too much poverty? Why Mangalyaan still matters

Let me be the first to confess I am not exactly sure what the Mars orbiter will be sending back to us, but I sure am glad as adman @SwapanSeth tweets “Mere paas Mars hain”. In a society increasingly obsessed with the car, bungalow, bank-balance, it’s splendid to see national jubilation over something, that for most of us laypersons at least, is about pure scientific adventure. The Mangalyaan mission is being hailed as a triumph of thrifty Indian ingenuity but it’s about more than the hashtag #jugaad. It might have cost less than the Hollywood film Gravity but jugaad with its make-shift Scotch-taped-together connotation is a rather uncharitable and even condescending hashtag for the enormous amount of hard work (and science) that ISRO undoubtedly put into this endeavour. Rest assured, if something had gone wrong at the last minute, as happened with India’s Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle in 2010 we would have been reading a lot about the astronomical folly of trying to do space on the cheap. [caption id=“attachment_1728407” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulating Isro chairman, K Radhakrishnan after successful Insertion of Mars Orbiter (Mangalyan) into the Mars orbit, at ISRO Headquarters, in Bengaluru on 24 September 2014. Image courtesy PIB[/caption] It’s easy in a country as beset with problems as India to wonder whether the entire space program is a folly, an exercise in misplaced hubris. We can quickly come up with infographics that show how many toilets could have been built for the price of one Mangalyaan and someone no doubt will. But Mangalyaan matters. It gives us a return on investment in ways that we cannot always imagine. The Value of First When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, he said it was one small step for him and one giant leap for mankind. That was very generous of him but of course in reality he was claiming the moon for the Americans. The moon was a trophy in the Cold War and the Americans got there first. End of story. Space is all about firsts. The first man in space. The first person to land on the moon. The first craft to land on Mars. The first craft to exit the solar system. And India which has often been an also-ran when it came to space, piggybacking on the kindness of others, now has its own unassailable first. It becomes the first country to enter the Mars orbit on first attempt. The Value of Research No one necessarily goes to out into space looking for advances in breast cancer screening technology but when one crosses into the final frontier it’s hard to even fathom the ripple effects of that exploration. NASA in the USA has had a mandate for “ technology transfer” and has documented over 1,500 spinoff success stories thanks to an endeavour that covers almost all major areas of the physical sciences. Teflon-coated fiberglass used in spacesuits is now roofing material all over the world. Space technologies have helped make safer schoolbuses, the artificial heart pump and clean-up solutions for contaminated freshwater. We do not know where this leads but the government has to have the will to take the risk even when it does not see short-term populist gain. The Value of Science If India wants to be more than the IT back-office of the world it has to invest in science. We can pat ourselves on the back about the Indian training of many of the ISRO scientists but this is a rare moment when a scientific triumph is dominating our news cycle. We should celebrate it but not forget that the “cheapness” of the mission also comes with a hidden cost. Science is woefully underfunded in this country. In 2003 India pledged to increase R&D from 1 percent of GDP to 2 percent by 2007. The 2012 government report showed it still remained under 1 percent, at a fifth of China’s investment in absolute terms. India has fewer fully-trained R&D professionals than Korea and ranks ninth in publications in peer-reviewed journals. Narendra Modi is right. This is a victory greater than the Indian cricket team winning a tournament. It does not mean we should invest all our resources in science camp rather than cricket camps. But for a country and media that worships cricket, this should be a red alert. Everyone, especially politicians, love success and let’s hope Mangalyaan spells acchey din for investment in the sciences. Space exploration should not have to rely on jugaad. The Value of ‘Yes, we can’ Yes, India is a poor country. Yes, India ranks low on many social indices. But to suggest that a country like India cannot look out towards space until it fixes all its problems at home also reeks of reverse snobbery. It makes space exploration the vanity exercise, the prerogative of only the well-heeled. America did not wait to deal with its endemic civil rights problem before going to the moon. The exploration of space is about getting a critical perspective – understanding that we live on a fragile planet in a very complicated universe. Mars and Venus become sobering examples not of the differences between men and women but of how climates can change dramatically and snuff out all possibility of life. The success of Mangalayaan is moment for nationalistic pride and chest-thumping but it is also a moment of humility because it puts our existence into perspective. Carl Sagan said, “We are starstuff contemplating the stars.” We don’t think about that enough. There’s nothing like an image of our planet reduced to a little blue dot to remind us of that. The Value of our Government Private investment in this kind of R&D is minimal in India. That’s hit us hard over and over again. “(Jagadish Chandra) Bose developed the idea of wireless (communications), but the discovery of radio was by Marconi, CV Raman discovered the Raman Effect, but Raman scanners were developed abroad," former CSIR chief RA Mashelkar told the Indian Science Congress. Mangalayaan is one rare example of big government doing something on its own and getting it right. And it’s something only governments want to take the risk on because its success and benefits can be so hard to gauge beforehand. Unlike the Commonwealth Games, this is a government project where contractors and middlemen have apparently not turned the whole exercise into a giant scam with shoddy building materials and collapsing flyovers. If Mangalyaan had not worked we would have all seen it. Disastrously. This is our government rupees at work and working right for a change. And for that we must be thankful. Narendra Modi joked that he had no doubts about the success of the mission. It’s named after Mangal which means good fortune and its acronym is MOM. And MOM never disappoints. True enough. But sons often disappoint their mothers. The question is will the rest of India now be a good son to its super-successful MOM.