A False Choice

How to have our cake and eat it too.

Today, Indian science has achieved a major milestone with the successful insertion of the ISRO designed and built “Mangalyaan” (or “Mars vehicle”) into Earth orbit. Accompanying this success there has also been a fair amount of criticism directed at the approximate expense — in the range of Rs. 400 crore or $ 70 million— involved in this mission. It is being suggested that this money would be better spent on various other social causes such as giving relief to victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy or for building toilets and sanitation facilities of which many places in India are in desperate need of. This criticism comes from people who wish good things for India and for Indian science and as all criticisms go it has its place in our discourse.

However, the fundamental flaw with such objections is that they present the listener with a false choice — either we can send a mission to Mars or we can invest in bettering the condition of impoverished Indians. Similar arguments are also heard whenever a nuclear submarine is built, an aircraft carrier is commissioned or any other similar large scale project is undertaken. Either we can invest hundreds or thousands of crores in ambitious undertakings or we can invest that money in educating our people.

There are several excellent reasons for why it makes perfectly good sense to invest in Mangalyaan, or in INS Arihant (the nuclear submarine) or in the INS Vikrant (the aircraft carrier) and their successors. These reasons are plentiful and with strong foundations and I need not repeat them here. They have been enunciated many times before many other countries, in earlier eras, went through similar stages of research and discovery. My argument here is simple. All such arguments against ambitious national undertakings, which do not appear to have immediate benefit for our citizen’s and our economy’s well-being, are based on the false assumption that doing A implies that we cannot also do B at the same time.

It is simply ludicrous to believe that a nation of 1.2 billion people, with aspirations of being a global superpower cannot undertake a vigorous space program at the same time as we lift hundreds and millions of our citizens out of the depths of poverty. It is not a question of deluding ourselves into believing that we can do both at the same time just because we happen to harbor dreams of greatness as one nation. Though, it does remain true, that if you happen to believe that we cannot do both simultaneously then you cannot also continue to harbor aspirations of attaining the status of a global superpower for your nation. More importantly, and more concretely, a nation which does not set its sights high, which does not provide a vision for its people beyond that of mere survival, will never in the long run prosper.

The prosperity, strength and well-being of any community, be it a village, town, state or country, is predicated on how inspired its members — especially the best and brightest — feel to undertake tasks previously considered impossible and to aim for targets previously considered unattainable. So while, there is solid evidence in favor of investing in a vigorous and well targeted program of space exploration and discovery — such as the fact that our remote sensing satellites helped save thousands of lives by allowing us to accurately predict the course of the cyclone Phailin or the fact that such investments generate as a beneficial side-effect innumerable technological spinoffs which are eventually incorporated into technology and products used on a daily basis — there is also the fact that unless we are bold enough to think not just one, two or ten years into the future, but into what we want our society to look like a hundred or two hundred years from now, we will never be able to lift ourselves up from the shelf of mediocrity and under-achievement where we have spent much of our existence as an independent nation.

On a different note one can ask why these critics of Mangalyaan are also not vociferously criticizing the proposed gigantic statue of Sardar Patel being commissioned by Mr. Narendra Modi, whose cost is estimated to be around Rs. 2500 crore which roughly five to six times the cost of the Mars mission. What purpose will that statue accomplish other than to prove that India has the biggest statue in the world? Whose hungry mouths will it feed other than those of the political class which has commissioned it? Whose naked body will it clothe other than the already well-dressed bodies of the contractors who will build it?

I do not wish to argue that we should not build Sardar Patel’s statue or statues and memorials of other great personalities. Such endeavors also play a role in inspiring Indians and in strengthening our collective feeling of nationhood. But must that statue be taller than any other statue in the world? Must it cost Rs. 2,500 crore, especially when much of that money — regardless of what fraction is public money and what fraction is private — will go to foreign contractors who have been hired to build that statue. At least the money spent on Mangalyaan is not going to NASA or to any other non-Indian entity. But these are my private views on the matter.

To sum, we need not quarrel amongst ourselves over building statues and spacecrafts or feeding our people, or choose between building aircraft carriers and submarines and educating our populace. We have enough resources, enough ambition and more than enough potential to accomplish all of these aims. To do so will not be easy. But as Barack Obama is fond of saying: “if it was easy, someone would have done it by now.”