‘Aim for the moon’ is a byword for any venture marked by extreme ambition bordering on the foolhardy. When India started space research in the 1960s, many thought it was being reckless: a struggling, young nation sinking some of its limited resources in a highly uncertain enterprise. Today, however, even the last of the naysayers must be convinced. In a matter of a few days, India became the first nation to land a rover on the south pole of the moon, followed up with a mission to study the sun. Yet, this is also the moment to revisit a nagging concern. How do such stellar achievements stand alongside the persistence of poverty and destitution for millions of Indians?
Even before the government set up the Indian Space Research Organization in 1969, the country was having a significant research programme in space science. It was then coordinated by the Department of Atomic Energy, which itself had been founded in the early 1950s. These were certainly not isolated initiatives. Between 1951 and 1961, India established five Indian Institutes of Technology, which in no time grew into globally respected academic centres. The first two Indian Institutes of Management were inaugurated in 1961. During the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a number of public sector units were established in diverse areas of industrial production that included steel, fertilizer, machine tools, electric machinery, drug production, and petrochemicals.
