Trichromatic Posted August 16, 2012 Posted August 16, 2012 Manmohan formally announces India's Mars mission Making the first formal announcement on the country’s Mars mission, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said India will send a mission to the Red Planet that will mark a huge step in the area of science and technology. “Recently, the Cabinet has approved the Mars Orbiter Mission. Under this Mission, our spaceship will go near Mars and collect important scientific information,” he said addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the occasion of the 66th Independence Day. India's mission to Mars more than confectionery (Reuters Breakingviews) - India has announced plans to send a satellite to Mars - just weeks after a malfunction on the underinvested power grid deprived 600 million people of electricity. It sounds like inexcusable waste. But the $80 million at stake is relatively small, and symbolic feats can pay economic dividends. Besides, it will take more than abandoning a space programme to close India's massive wealth gap. For such a poor and populous country, space exploration might seem low priority. A British politician fumed to a tabloid newspaper that 300 million pounds a year of British taxpayers' money goes to India in the form of aid, saying: "If the Indians can afford to send high-tech missions into space, they can afford to look after their own." He has a point: half India's children are malnourished. But such thinking is too simplistic. India is on multiple development paths, which combine aspects of wealth and poverty at the same time. Visitors marvel at the high-tech success story of Bangalore's IT outsourcers and despair at the grinding poverty and chronic lack of infrastructure that plights much of India's 1.2 billion population. India's systemic poverty isn't produced by wasteful space projects, but by an inability to channel funds into needed infrastructure and projects that create growth...
Recommended Posts