ISRO: Not Privatisation Alone, Equally Concerning is Threat to Its Sovereignty
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), one of the country’s most remarkable achievements in science and technology, is facing an internal crisis at precisely the moment when the government is pushing aggressively to expand the role of private capital in the space sector
India’s space programme has reached a moment that demands much more than administrative reassurance. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), one of the country’s most remarkable achievements in science and technology, is facing an internal crisis at precisely the moment when the government is pushing aggressively to expand the role of private capital in the space sector.
Nine employee organisations representing thousands of ISRO personnel have now sought written clarification from the organisation’s leadership about the direction in which the space programme is being taken. Their intervention is significant because it comes from within an institution whose scientists and engineers have themselves built the capabilities that India is now proposing to distribute to private industry. The immediate concern is not simply employment. It is whether functions that constitute the technological and institutional foundation of ISRO are gradually being removed from the public organisation in the name of creating a larger commercial space ecosystem.
The government and ISRO have responded that there will be no privatisation of ISRO and that the organisation will remain India’s principal institution for advanced space research, national and strategic missions, space science, exploration and critical and frontier capabilities. That assurance is important, but it does not settle the argument. The question that India must confront is much more fundamental:
Can ISRO remain a powerful public institution if significant parts of the technological chain through which it acquired and maintains its capabilities are progressively transferred outside it?
Privatisation does not necessarily require the formal sale of an organisation. An institution can remain legally owned by the state while losing its manufacturing capacity, operational experience, technological personnel and institutional memory to outside companies. If that happens, the name and building may remain public while the substance of the institution is progressively dispersed.
This is why the distinction being made between ISRO’s “core” activities and activities that can be handed over to private companies deserves much greater scrutiny. The government’s space policy envisages ISRO concentrating on research and development and advanced missions while routine operational missions and commercial activities increasingly move towards private players. On paper, this may appear to be a rational division of labour. In practice, however, it assumes that research, design, manufacturing, testing, integration and operations can be neatly separated without weakening the integrity of the scientific institution that depends upon all of them. That assumption is questionable.
A space agency does not acquire technological mastery simply by designing something in a laboratory. It acquires mastery through the continuous interaction of scientists, engineers, production teams, testing facilities and launch operations. Every launch provides experience. Every failure produces knowledge. Every manufacturing problem teaches the designer something about the limits of a technology. Every successful mission adds to an institutional memory accumulated over decades.
The argument that India needs private industry to manufacture launch vehicles because ISRO should concentrate on more advanced work therefore contains a profound misunderstanding of how technological capability is created. Manufacturing is not merely the mechanical execution of a design produced somewhere else. In advanced technology, manufacturing itself is a repository of knowledge. The people who make a launch vehicle understand tolerances, materials, processes, defects and failures in ways that cannot be captured completely in drawings or technical documents. Engineers learn from the relationship between design and production, while scientists learn from the behaviour of technologies under actual operating conditions. To separate these functions too sharply is to risk weakening the very ecosystem that has allowed ISRO to innovate.
The issue becomes particularly serious when the transfer involves technologies developed through decades of public investment. A consortium led by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is now producing the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, while technology for the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle has been transferred to HAL. These developments are presented as evidence of India’s expanding space ecosystem. But the question that must be asked is not whether Indian companies are capable of manufacturing rockets. They clearly are. The question is why capabilities developed inside a public scientific institution should be progressively transferred out of that institution rather than being used to strengthen India’s public technological capacity while simultaneously enabling private industry to grow around it.
There is an important difference between private participation and privatisation, and that difference must not be deliberately blurred. There is absolutely no reason why Indian companies should not manufacture components for ISRO, supply specialised equipment, provide engineering services, develop complementary technologies or undertake contracted production under the direction and standards of the national space programme.
Indeed, India’s private industrial capacity can be an enormous asset to ISRO. The problem begins when private participation becomes a rationale for transferring core technological capabilities, production systems, operational responsibilities and accumulated public knowledge away from ISRO. At that point the relationship changes from industry serving a public scientific institution to the public scientific institution becoming increasingly dependent upon private industry.
India should resist that transformation completely. ISRO is not an ordinary government department whose performance should be measured principally by whether another organisation can perform one of its functions more cheaply. Nor is it simply another state-owned enterprise competing in a commercial market. It is a national scientific institution whose existence embodies a strategic commitment by the Indian state to develop technological capabilities that the country could not safely leave to external suppliers or market forces. Its achievements were made possible because successive generations of scientists were allowed to build knowledge patiently, often without any immediate commercial return. The space programme was never justified because launching satellites would produce attractive profits for shareholders. It was justified because space technology could contribute to communications, weather forecasting, agriculture, disaster management, navigation, scientific exploration, national security and the broader technological sovereignty of India.
That distinction matters even more today because space technology is no longer a distant scientific curiosity. Satellites underpin communications and navigation systems, weather forecasting, remote sensing and numerous civilian and strategic applications. Launch vehicles represent sophisticated combinations of propulsion, materials science, electronics, guidance, control systems and systems engineering. A country that possesses these capabilities possesses a degree of technological sovereignty that cannot be reduced to the value of individual contracts. If the state gradually ceases to retain the ability to build, test and operate critical systems itself, it may discover too late that technological sovereignty has been replaced by contractual dependence.
Nor should the argument be dismissed by saying that the private companies involved are Indian. The nationality of a corporation does not change the fundamental character of a private enterprise. A corporation has shareholders, commercial objectives, investment pressures and responsibilities that differ from those of a public scientific institution. It may be an excellent partner to government, but it cannot automatically become a substitute for a national institution whose responsibility extends beyond profitability and market opportunity. A public space programme must maintain capabilities even when they are not commercially attractive, must conduct research whose benefits may emerge only decades later, and must preserve expertise that may have little immediate market value but enormous strategic significance.
This is precisely why the present concerns of ISRO’s employees should not be dismissed as resistance to modernisation. The nine employee organisations have asked for clarity about the future of launch-vehicle production, satellite manufacturing, operations and the role of ISRO’s workforce. Reports indicate that their concerns include the possibility that existing employees could eventually become surplus or lose meaningful roles if functions are transferred outside the organisation. These are not trivial employment questions. They go to the heart of whether the institution will continue to possess the human capacity required to perform the functions for which it has historically been responsible.
This becomes even more disturbing in the context of reports earlier this year that close to or more than 100 ISRO scientists had left, prompting the Department of Space to tighten procedures governing resignation and voluntary retirement. The numbers and causes require careful examination, but the larger issue cannot be avoided. An institution whose greatest asset is the accumulated knowledge of its scientists cannot afford an erosion of that human capital while simultaneously transferring technological functions to outside organisations. If experienced personnel leave, and the functions in which they developed their expertise are also moved out, India risks losing not merely employees but an irreplaceable layer of institutional memory.
The response to such an exodus should not simply be to make departure more difficult. It should be to ask why highly trained scientists would want to leave an institution that once represented one of the most inspiring destinations for Indian scientific talent. ISRO needs stronger recruitment, better career structures, adequate research funding, greater professional autonomy, modern infrastructure and a renewed sense of institutional purpose. Young scientists should be looking towards ISRO because they see it as a place where they can participate in ambitious national projects and build scientific capabilities for future generations. They should not be looking at it as an organisation whose responsibilities are steadily being outsourced while private companies offer the more attractive professional future.
There is an irony here that India should confront honestly. The country spent decades developing its space programme under conditions in which access to advanced technology was restricted and external dependence was a serious strategic vulnerability. Indian scientists therefore had to learn to build capabilities themselves. They created launch vehicles, satellites, propulsion systems and increasingly sophisticated missions through an extraordinary process of indigenous learning. The restrictions imposed on India by technologically advanced countries did not destroy the programme; they helped reinforce the determination to develop indigenous capacity. ISRO became one of the clearest examples of what public investment, scientific autonomy and long-term national planning could accomplish. Having built that capability, India should not now voluntarily fragment it because private capital has become fashionable.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a private aerospace industry. In fact, India should encourage the growth of a large, technically sophisticated domestic aerospace manufacturing sector. But the appropriate model is one in which private industry grows around a strong ISRO, not one in which ISRO progressively withdraws from activities that have historically sustained its own technological competence. The public institution should remain capable of designing, developing, manufacturing, testing and operating the systems upon which the national programme depends, while private companies can supplement that capacity, compete for contracts and develop new technologies in partnership with the state.
If the government genuinely believes that India needs dozens of launch vehicles each year, the obvious question is why that expansion should require ISRO to retreat from launch-vehicle production. Why not expand public capacity as well as private capacity? Why should the answer to increased demand be to reduce the role of the institution that built the technology in the first place? If more satellites are required, why not invest in additional public manufacturing capacity while also contracting private companies? If the private sector possesses specialised expertise, why not bring that expertise into a genuinely collaborative public framework rather than allowing technology and institutional responsibility to migrate outward?
The answer appears to lie in a broader ideological commitment to reducing the role of the public sector. That is where the ISRO controversy becomes larger than ISRO itself. India is being encouraged across sectors to accept the proposition that the state should increasingly withdraw from production and leave private capital to perform functions previously undertaken by public institutions. Sometimes this is justified in terms of efficiency; sometimes in terms of competition; sometimes in terms of attracting investment. But beneath the different arguments lies a common assumption: that what can be commercialised should eventually be commercialised.
That assumption must be challenged. There are areas of national life where the public interest cannot be reduced to the commercial interest. Scientific research is one of them. Strategic technology is another. Space is unquestionably part of both.
The danger is not that a private company will manufacture a rocket successfully. The danger is that, over time, the public institution will lose the capacity to manufacture that rocket itself. Once that happens across enough areas, the state may still possess regulatory authority while no longer possessing the underlying technical capability. It can supervise contracts without being able to reproduce the technology independently. It can purchase systems without maintaining the capacity to develop them. It can regulate an industry while becoming dependent upon it.
That is not technological sovereignty. It is technological dependence with a different ownership structure. The government’s assurances that ISRO will remain the country’s leading space institution must therefore be converted into something much more substantive than statements intended to calm employees. India needs a clear national commitment that the core technological capabilities of ISRO will remain within the public domain. Research, design, development, manufacturing, integration, testing, launch capability and strategic mission operations should not be dismantled piecemeal under the argument that private industry can perform them. Where private companies are involved, their role should be complementary and accountable to a strong public technological institution rather than a substitute for it.
The public deserves to know exactly where the boundary stands. Also, the scientists and engineers of ISRO deserve to know what their institution will look like ten and twenty years from now. And the country deserves to know whether the enormous public investment that created India’s space capability is being used to strengthen that capability or to create a pipeline through which public technology, public expertise and public institutional responsibility gradually flow towards private accumulation.
This is why the present moment should be treated as a genuine national debate rather than a minor disagreement between management and employees. The concerns emerging from within ISRO are a warning that something fundamental is being questioned. The reported departure of scientists, the uncertainty surrounding recruitment and career structures, the transfer of technologies, the movement of production towards private companies and the government’s declared intention to expand the commercial role of the private sector are not isolated developments. Taken together, they raise the possibility of a profound restructuring of India’s most important scientific institution.
India must not wait until the restructuring is complete before asking what has been lost. The country should instead choose a different direction: strengthen ISRO, invest in its scientists, expand its public manufacturing and research capabilities, and allow private industry to participate without acquiring the core of the national space programme. There is no contradiction between a strong public space agency and a flourishing private aerospace industry. The contradiction arises only when private expansion requires the weakening of the public institution.
ISRO belongs to a tradition of Indian development in which knowledge was treated as a national resource and scientific capability as part of sovereignty. Its achievements were financed by the people of India and built by generations of publicly supported scientists and engineers. That inheritance cannot be treated as a collection of technologies waiting to be transferred to whichever corporation can commercialise them most efficiently. The country has every right to use private industry as a partner, but it has no reason to surrender the institutional capabilities that made its space programme possible.
The real issue, therefore, is not whether India should have a larger space economy. It should. The real issue is whether the expansion of that economy will be built on the strength of ISRO or on the gradual withdrawal of ISRO from the very capabilities that define it. If India chooses the latter path, the country may discover that it has created a larger commercial space sector while simultaneously weakening the public scientific institution that gave it a place among the world’s spacefaring nations. That would be a disastrous bargain.
The ISRO exodus should therefore be understood not simply as a problem of scientists leaving jobs. It is a warning about what happens when people who carry institutional memory begin to see uncertainty about the future of the institution they have served. India should listen to that warning before the loss becomes irreversible. The answer to the challenges facing ISRO is not privatisation, outsourcing or the gradual transfer of its core capabilities. The answer is to renew the public commitment to science, strengthen the institution, restore confidence among its scientists and build India’s private space industry alongside a powerful ISRO rather than in place of it.
India did not build ISRO so that, after achieving technological sovereignty through decades of public effort, it could gradually hand the foundations of that sovereignty to private capital. It built ISRO because it understood that some capabilities are too important to be surrendered to the market. Space is one of them, and ISRO is the institution through which India has made that sovereignty real.
[The writer, Dr Ranjan Solomon, has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned author- researcher-freelance writer focussed on questions of justice and public interest – global, national and local. Ranjan Solomon is best known for his close solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. Over the last year, he has written a number of pieces on issues of West Asia. Ranjan Solomon can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com]
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