ISRO must evolve, not retreat
As private companies take a larger role in rocket manufacturing, concerns are growing that it could weaken the very institution that built India’s space programme
Days after a flawless GSLV launch put another Indian Earth-observation satellite into orbit, nine employee associations of the Indian Space Research Organisation did something unprecedented: they wrote jointly to chairman V Narayanan, demanding clarity on whether the government intends to strip ISRO of its core function building and launching rockets — and hand it to private industry instead. The trigger was a remark by IN-SPACe chief Pawan Goenka that ISRO will eventually stop manufacturing launch vehicles altogether. The unions fear exactly what they said aloud: that India’s space agency is being reduced to a “residual R&D boutique”, stripped of the SSLV, PSLV and LVM3 production lines, the new Kulasekarapattinam spaceport and 120 of its own technologies, all migrating to private hands with no roadmap explained to the workforce that built them.
This anxiety did not appear from nowhere. Through this year, ISRO has watched more than a hundred scientists — many from the UR Rao Satellite Centre and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, several tied to Gaganyaan itself — walk out for the salaries and stock options on offer at Skyroot, Agnikul and Pixxel. The Department of Space had to freeze routine resignation approvals for scientists on strategic missions just to slow the bleeding. Two consecutive PSLV setbacks and a delayed Gaganyaan timeline have not helped morale.
None of this should obscure what ISRO has actually built. It reached Mars orbit on its first attempt, for a fraction of what any other spacefaring nation had spent on the feat. It landed near the Moon’s unexplored south pole, a first for any country. Its PSLV once carried 104 satellites into orbit in a single flight, a world record at the time. NavIC, weather forecasting, disaster warning, rural communication and defence surveillance all run on ISRO-built and ISRO-operated satellites. Every private Indian rocket firm flying today exists in a market ISRO created, using talent ISRO trained and technology ISRO de-risked first.
That history is precisely the argument for keeping ISRO at the helm, not retiring it. There is a real case for private industry taking over volume manufacturing of proven vehicles like the SSLV - it frees scientists for harder problems and lets India launch more, faster. But manufacturing capacity is not the same as sovereign capability. Deep-space missions, human spaceflight, strategic and defence payloads, and next-generation propulsion must stay under ISRO’s direct control - because private firms are not yet built to carry that risk, and because a nation’s space programme is a strategic asset, not a supply chain to be handed off.
The government owes these nine associations, and the country, the plan it has so far declined to publish: which functions move to industry, on what timeline, and how ISRO’s scientists are retained, paid and promoted through the transition. Ambiguity, not privatisation, is what is emptying ISRO’s corridors. India can build a space economy that includes private industry without hollowing out the institution that made a space economy possible in the first place.
