India Announces Mission to Mars

The economy is is in a tailspin. Industrial manufacturing is dramatically down. Industrial conflict, as a consequence of new contract, temporary labour policies was recently in evidence at the Suzuki plant just outside Delhi. The water supply is not just contaminated, but contaminated with uranium in certain parts of the country. Tens of thousands of farmers have committed suicide over the past decade or so. The disenfranchised and the destitute are flocking to from the countryside to the big cities, and most of them hope to scrounge by somehow. A majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and over sixty percent of the population has no access to toilets at all. As a result, tens of thousands die each year due to dysentery and diarrhoea. The lack of power and a water supply has led to a number of "riots" in many areas, particularly Gurgaon. The "water mafia" has a field day supplying substandard water to the hapless citizens in the blistering summer. The entire electric grid was down, not once but twice in one single week. The malls that continue to be built are running out of water and need extra electric power. The Maoist insurgency rages on with hundreds of thousands trapped between the guns of the security forces and the Maoists. Hundreds of thousands continue to be displaced due to land acquisition that is supposedly essential for "development".  Many of them end up as garbage scavengers in the streets of Delhi. The luckier ones try to eke out a precarious living by hawking on the streets, until they give up and fall victim to "smack" and somehow manage to survive on the free food offered outside many temples and the leftovers from restaurants. About half a million were displaced in the aftermath of the large-scale and widespread recent ethnic conflict in Assam. Whatever basic provisions for basic healthcare and subsidies for railway transportations were available are slowly being whittled away by the devotees of the mantra of "liberalization" and "de-regulation". During the economic crisis, as the rupee crashed in value this summer and it was clear that despite all the hype, industrial production had declined, Prof. Kaushik Basu, the chief economic advisor to the government of India was busy pushing the opening of the market to the likes of Wallmart. The entirely predictable argument was that in the "short run"small shopkeepers and their suppliers might suffer a bit, but in the long run, the move would be good for some abstract entity called "the economy".

Against this contextual backdrop, the Prime Minister in his Independence Day address announced an  Indian mission to Mars. He quoted the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on the goal of the Indian mission as nothing less than researching the "geology, origin, evolution and sustainability of life" on Mars." Most rational Indians would no doubt agree that research into the factors that might sustain life on Mars should be right at the top of the agenda of Indian scientists and policymakers. One hopes that research into the sustainability of life in India, although not that urgent an issue at the moment, will be on the radar screen a few decades from now.