Low-Budget Indian Satellite Launch

Geekonomical writes "On Thursday afternoon, for a mere 15 million U.S. dollars, India launched a meteorological satellite into geo-synchronous transfer orbit some 36,000 kilometres above the equator using a modified version of its highly successful space workhorse, the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV). The article also claims that China spends 12 times as much as this for a launch!"

Comments

Agriculture.

[The Cydonian]

It's not about spying or ICBM's or anything, the key factor here is, believe it or not, agriculture. I know other patriotic Indians have problems accepting this, but India is still largely an agriculture-based economy, with the population especially concentrated in rural areas. With the exploding population creating pressure on food resources, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research actively involves itself in creating better yielding food varieties .

Students of Indian history would have heard about the green revolution that created self-sustainence in food; a crucial post-independence achievement considering food scarcity situations such as the 1943 Bengal Famine (the one on which Amartya Sen did economic research and won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics).

Now with satellite technology, ICAR can identify which land areas are suitable for which crops and therefore goad farmers into growing those varieties (remember that India is a sub-continent; you have all sorts of terrain, from deserts to plains to plateaus to, of course, mountains.

So accurately knowing which crop goes best where is critical information for the hungry masses (over-cliched, but it's true). Methinks that this will be the biggest use, followed closely by telecommunications and satellite television AND then by urban planning (Mumbai will have 24.7 million people by 2005).

PS:- Note that I'm not saying that satellite technology wont be used for other purposes; I definitely want India to use cutting-edge technology against a couple of motherfuckers, but talking only about that would be misleading.