Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space? (reuters.com)

Reuters reports: India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects. The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.

Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years. G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.
Space.com shared a reaction from a national security affairs professor at Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. They argued that India's test "likely represents a feeling by other countries, specifically India in this case, that the weaponization of space is forthcoming, and India doesn't want to be left out of the 'have' category if arms-control agreements are eventually reached."

Comments

India is a typical failed nation.

[Anonymous Coward]

India is a typical failed nation.

New Delhi wastes money on military satellites and nuclear weapons when most Indians live in poverty. By contrast, when Poland was an impoverished nation, Warsaw deliberately refused to spend money on military satellites and nuclear weapons; the Polish government spent most of its resources on economic development.

Today, India remains economically poor, but Poland is relatively wealthy.

Among the Russian elites, supporters of Vladimir Putin use India to justify rejecting democracy. They point to the poverty and poor governance in India. They recommend autocratic China as a model for Russian development.

Get more informatioin about this issue.

Huh?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space

I thought it meant the dawn of a new era of peace, love, reason and understanding. No?

Re:Huh?

[Hognoxious]

No. That's when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

An easy mistake to make though.

Re: Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that the Crusades ended 600 years ago.

The rape and conquest of Europe and the West continue to this day unabated.

When white men take over your country it's evil colonialism. When Muslims do it, it's beautiful diversity and multiculturalism.

Re:Huh?

[Ol Olsoc]

Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space

I thought it meant the dawn of a new era of peace, love, reason and understanding. No?

It means ugh. I'd love to see their math on how the know the debris will drop out in 45 days. Ohh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris. Killing satellites is actually pretty easy. It is a broad side of the barn type accuracy needed.

Pretty much if you can get a rocket to orbital velocity and make it go kaboom, you are 90 percent of the way there.

The utter stupidity of humans amazes me though. The US and the old Soviet Union understood and worked within the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. China understands this now. Sending up Satellite killers is neither difficult nor smart.

Our first war in space will be our last one for a long, long time. And it will destroy a lot of things that are very beneficial to everyone, as well as destroy things that are beneficial to the country that thinks it is smart to put a lot of high velocity space debris in orbit.

Re:Huh?

[Immerman]

I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature. It's not like you're nuking cities or releasing deadly plagues - there's no survival-threatening fallout from destroying satellites, just a physics-enforced omni-lateral armistice on military (and any other) satellites if debris gets to be a big enough problem.

It also serves as discouragement against the nations such as the US that have already militarized orbit (spy satellites, GPS), and are quite possibly secretly weaponizing it. The more people who can knock out your military hardware, the less valuable it is.

What does destroying satellites actually accomplish? You could take out GPS or communications satellites - that would be a nuisance, cause a bit of economic distress, and reduce the enemies battlefield efficiency a bit, but isn't *that* devastating or strategically valuable, and is unlikely to be something anyone would do unless surface hostilities had already begun. It also lets you take out orbital military hardware like spy satellites and weapons platforms - which are the real threat.

>Oh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris.
Well, it's not really that hard - so long as you hit the satellite head-on so that none of the debris gets accelerated faster in its orbit, then ANY path the debris takes will put it on an orbit that plunges deeper into the Earth's atmosphere. And, if the missile was going either sub-orbital or counter-orbital, then it won't create any stable debris either.

Now is that the case? I have no idea. But at worst, it's still not nearly as reckless as putting military resources in space in the first place, so that other countries are required to develop the ability to remove them in order to be able to defend themselves.

Re:Huh?

[Ol Olsoc]

I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature.

Oh hell yeah. It's an awesome defense. Send up say 500 1 ton payloads of explosive and various sized particles, timed to explode and scatter debris in various orbital planes, retrograde them, and enjoy the loss of just about everything in orbit. Take out all the GPS sats. This is why we are going to resurrect Loran.

And it you really want to make the future rosy, take out geosynchronous orbit areas.

This can be a first class offensive weapon. A long lasting one as well.

Are you seriously saying that you know all of the debris paths and speeds of both the explosive device and the satellites it destroys? Stuff flies everywhere, ad different speeds and different directions. Especially your direct hit scenario, which will be very asymmetrical, and send shrapnel all over the place.

Orbital mechanics is very interesting, and while large orbiting objects deorbiting can be calculated with a bit of confidence usually within days when they are getting close, calculating the deorbit of miscellaneous debris traveling at different speeds, which is going to put them in higher or lower orbits is the sort of thing that only happens after tracking them - and does India have the sort of tracking system that allows them to truthfully say they know that all of this happens in 45 days?

Re: Huh?

[Type44Q]

Culturally speaking, Slavs fall under the general category of Westerners.

Re:Huh?

[Solandri]

. I'd love to see their math on how the know the debris will drop out in 45 days. Ohh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris.

Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee and converts the elliptical orbit back into a circle, now at the higher orbit.

If you only apply one delta-V, all it does is turn your circular orbit into an ellipse. The key thing is that this new elliptical orbit must include the point in the original orbit where the delta-V occurred. This means if the original orbit was circular, the new elliptical orbit must intersect that original circle at some point. Meaning a single velocity change cannot increase your perigee. Only if the delta-V was in the direction of the original orbital motion does it result in the same perigee (and a higher apogee). All other possible delta-V vectors result in a lower perigee, meaning if the original circular orbit was just outside the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere, the debris will now orbit through a denser part of the atmosphere, and burn up and deorbit more quickly than if left in the original circular orbit

So generally, these destructive tests aren't harmful when done to satellites in low orbit. The vast majority of the debris ends up in new orbits which will deorbit faster than the satellite would have if it had been left alone. And you might get a few "lucky" pieces of debris which are now in an elliptical orbit with the original orbit's perigee, but now with a higher apogee.

If you conduct the test at a higher orbit though (like China did), the debris whose new orbits have a lower perigee may not have a perigee low enough to skim the Earth's atmosphere to slow it down substantially. And so a greater portion of the debris will remain in orbit for decades or centuries.

Re: Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Culturally speaking, one half of Slavs suffered war and slavery under Mongols with additional attempted invasions by Ottomans, while the other suffered slavery and war and stagnation under Ottomans; all of them kept being harassed by both the West and East; none of them colonized any brown or black regions with even Russia's annexation of Siberia being reparation for the Mongol Empire's deeds, making Slavic nations a greater part of the 33 European nations which weren't involved in colonization; they were not considered white by Nazi Germans and were regarded as either a slave race or a collective deemed for cleansing of both people and history; and they were also oppressed with an attempt to revise and erase their histories and identities under Communism, and unlike Westerners had first-hand experience at this ideology when it is set loose outside of a fantasy book's vacuum and upon reality where it needs to be reconfigured to deal with reality where it turned out to be shit, the result of which was a unified decision to burn it to the ground; all while being the grey area and front between Western and Eastern cultures which the West could never overcome while the East paid its price eventually for attempting to; all while always somehow keeping up with the technological toes of the West despite conditions and poverty and even managing to inch their territories closer towards the West over time rather than the West spreading East.

Re:Huh?

[Ol Olsoc]

. I'd love to see their math on how the know the debris will drop out in 45 days. Ohh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris.

Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee and converts the elliptical orbit back into a circle, now at the higher orbit.

Elliptical or not, there might be another satellite that ends up intercepting the debris.

Re:Huh?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Are you seriously saying that you know all of the debris paths and speeds of both the explosive device and the satellites it destroys? Stuff flies everywhere, ad different speeds and different directions. Especially your direct hit scenario, which will be very asymmetrical, and send shrapnel all over the place.

If you consider the facts that only debris with only inclination changes isn't brought deeper into the atmosphere at some point and that most debris is small and even less aerodynamic than the original satellite, it becomes clear that around 300 km, several weeks or months does indeed seem like a reasonable estimate for a large part of the debris. Here's an analysis for a comparable US test.

Re:Huh?

[Immerman]

You are talking orbital flak for the specific purpose of rendering an orbital shell unusable, which is an entirely different thing than shooting down a specific satellite. To destroy a satellite cleanly you want a relatively low payload weapon - something that's not going to send debris flying off at speeds anywhere near even a single km/s, and thus won't radically alter it's orbital trajectory. Leaving the debris cloud to slowly expand to fill a ring around the original satellite's orbit, restricted by the fact that every piece of debris must pass back through the point of explosion on every pass (neglecting aerobraking and gravitational pertubation)

But, sure, lets say you send up all that flak - there's really only two options:
1) you restrict it to a narrow range of altitudes, in which case if you get far enough above or below it and you're fine. Effective at taking out large groups of existing satellites, but not at general orbital denial.

2) the shrapnel isn't dense enough to cause frequent impacts with satellites. There are 238x10^15 cubic kilometers of space within the orbit of the moon. Put a billion tonnes of chaff into lower orbit than that, and the average density will be 4ug per cubic kilometer - or one smallish grain of sand per 2000 cubic kilometers. And for reference there's currently well under 50,000 tonnes of equipment in orbit (5000 satellites, the biggest of which are several tonnes, but most of which are small, plus 417 tonnes of ISS), which would be a grain of sand per 40,000,000 cubic kilometers

Satellites might need to start including armor plating and/or aerogel impact absorber as a standard feature to withstand the occasional impact, and the expected maintenance-free operating life might be shortened notably, but it wouldn't be a show-stopper.

And then there's the $10M question:

Why would a space power capable enough to comprehensively flak the entire orbital sphere, wish to do so? To deny a larger space power their advantage? If they're exploiting their advantage so ruthlessly that someone else is willing to shoot off their own foot to stop them, then maybe hitting the reset button and taking a hiatus for a few generations to reflect on what went wrong would be a good thing.

Re:Huh?

[Ol Olsoc]

And then there's the $10M question:

Why would a space power capable enough to comprehensively flak the entire orbital sphere, wish to do so? To deny a larger space power their advantage? If they're exploiting their advantage so ruthlessly that someone else is willing to shoot off their own foot to stop them, then maybe hitting the reset button and taking a hiatus for a few generations to reflect on what went wrong would be a good thing.

Let's say you were the leader of a rogue state - there are a few. One way to punish countries like the US is to take away our toys. Seems some people in government agree since they are ressurecting Loran-C.

And we do have the example of India launching one. As well, you don't have to have much guidance, just a couple ton fragment space grenade.

While I don't thiink this is all that likely, hey - strange stuff happens.

More than explosive satellite killers, I'm concerned about EMP events.

But I'm sort of surprised that so many here don't think this is a big deal.

Re:Huh?

[rtb61]

Anti-satellite weapon. Ever seen a solar power array, the old ones where they reflect light and generate lots and lots of heat. So set up 1 square kilometre mirror array, wait for daylight and point that daylight at the satellite, you'll cook it for sure. Creating debris in space in orbital paths should be considered an international crime and India and any other nation that does it should be punished for doing so and denied access to space.

Is this even a serious question?

[bferrell]

"Is this the weaponization of space?"

"Space" has been weaponized since at least 1966, when Robert Heinlein wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... Remember dropping grain carriers loaded with tons of rocks?

Just as geosynchronous satellites became a foregone conclusion once Clarke postulated about the math for them in 1945.

Duh

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[AmiMoJo]

India is just following others anyway. Last week the US tested an anti-ICBM system, and both the US and China have tested their own anti-satellite systems before.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Of course it's a question. The militarization of space has been possible for a long time, but the world's space-faring powers signed a treaty outlawing space-based weapons. Maybe update your calendar past 1966 and understand why this is a significant change in the status quo.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[JaredOfEuropa]

The status quo being that only 3 other nations already had an anti-sat missile?

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[sheramil]

If you're gonna go there, then space has been weaponized since the 1930s, when the Lensmen took out Helmuth's base.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-ICBM systems don't leave crap in orbital space, it's all sub-orbital, on both sides.

You can't fix Kessler Syndrome by turning it off and on again. Who would've thought it would be India that started it.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[quenda]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... Remember dropping grain carriers loaded with tons of rocks?

It is a lot harder than "dropping". From the moon, you need a gun with a muzzle velocity of at least 2.3km/s. (or ballistic missile delta-V)
Current rail-gun technology can do this, but only for much smaller payloads, and we are a long way from getting the required battleships/frigates to the moon.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[Immerman]

Think of it a little differently - Kessler Syndrome itself "turns off" the militarization of orbit - a physics enforced global armistice on orbital military hardware that lasts for generations, barring active cleanup efforts. Whether we "turn it on again" afterwards - that's up to us.

I suspect It would be extremely difficult to achieve in any meaningful way though - explosions and collisions aren't going to dramatically alter orbital energies, except downwards. So while you would develop "shells" of debris that would soon destroy any satellites within them, the orbits above those shells would remain clear. And the density of debris would have to be truly enormous to prevent launches getting through it to access higher orbits (albeit at greater risk and expense), while such a dense shell would deorbit much faster due to inter-debris collisions.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[Immerman]

Sure - and India hasn't made any motions in that direction. Being able to destroy orbital resources from the ground is, if anything, a great way to *discourage* the further militarization of space by the US, China, Russia, etc. All of whom have been heavily militarizing it for decades with GPS, spy satellites, etc.

Re:Is this even a serious question?

[Immerman]

True, and that would be inconvenient. Most orbital services though could be delivered from high-altitude balloon instead - in many cases that would even be an improvement. And relatively unattractive extreme high orbits are unlikely to be affected, with the possible exception of geostationary. So as long as the cloud density is low enough for rockets to get through it, space will remain accessible. And you'd need many orders of magnitude more debris to exclude rockets that spend a few hours passing through, than to destroy satellites that remain in orbit until the timing synchronizes perfectly with some chunk of debris in an intersecting orbit.

Plus, LEO may clear relatively quickly - the smaller the debris, the faster air resistance deorbits is. Half the size means half the mass-to-area ratio, and thus twice the deceleration. The question would be how dense the "rain" from collisions in higher, otherwise stable orbits would be.

Besides, if orbit has been militarized to the point that a Kessler Syndrome scenario becomes a serious possibility, giving up civilian orbital benefits for a while to get rid of it might be a good trade. (non-military causes pretty much require a level of widespread carelessness that we're not seeing). Orbital weapons are kind of a nightmare scenario for people on the ground.

Ehm... Yes!

[aglider]

What other objective can you see there?

Don't kid yourself

[WindBourne]

US and Russia held back for decades due to treaties. But when china really got into space & was not bound by the treaty, well, all 3 almost certainly have weapons up there.

Re:Don't kid yourself

[phayes]

Yeah those Russians certainly held back from deploying weapons in space

Election year

[Vingborg]

The general election in India is scheduled to start in a couple of weeks, and they recently had yet another big row with Pakistan. Just saying.

Re:Election year

[gtall]

Yah, nothing sez "I am standing here with my Big Dick" in Indiana politics like lighting off a sat. killer and helping to contribute to the crap in near Earth orbit. By gum, he'll show those Pakistanis just what will happen to their future satellites. Maybe the Pakistanis will get their China buddy to lend them one of their sat. killers...errr...and a satellite to aim at...and a ground launch pad...with some extra equipment it make it go.

"Forthcoming" ?

[Antique Geekmeister]

There are too many security launches with classified payloads to pretend that the USA and Russia have not been launching at least anti-satellite weapons systems. Too many peaceful but energetic projects are also potentially weapons to be unwilling to acknowledge their danger. Solar mirrors can be aimed at space targets or ground targets, as can the "flying crowbar" project known as Project Pluto. The LEO cleanup tools, still on the drawing board, could take down accidental or obsolete debris in low Earth orbit. They could also destroy satellites.

Re:"Forthcoming" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar mirrors can be aimed at space targets or ground targets, as can the "flying crowbar" project known as Project Pluto.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Firstly, solar mirrors aren't a practical weapon. The sun subtends an angle of 0.5 degrees, so any beam of reflected sunlight must have a beam size of at least 0.5 degrees. From low Earth orbit, at an altitude of ~1000 km, that means the spot size of the beam on the surface will be at least 10 km. If you want to (say) double background sunlight in the target area, your satellite mirror also needs to be 10 km across. And from low orbit it will only spend a few minutes over any given point before it disappears over the horizon.

Second, Project Pluto was nothing to do with flying crowbars or space. It was a program to develop an unmanned bomber with a nuclear jet engine. The idea was that it could cruise continuously, for years on end without landing - and if given the signal, it would fly over enemy territory, dropping nuclear bombs as it went. It's a conceptual retaliation weapon, like ballistic missile submarines, but less practical - and no component of it is ever intended to go to space.

Re:"Forthcoming" ?

[Immerman]

Are you sure about that minimum spot size? I'm not that well versed in optics, and not quite sure how to phrase the question to get google to offer a relevant answer. Most discussions seem to only consider point sources. It's an important detail for a lot of orbital technologies though, so I'd love to get a better handle on it if you can point me at anything useful.

Assuming you are right, there's still more than the total spot size to consider. There's the brightness distribution. Pretty much anyone who has ever burned things with a magnifying lens or mirror knows that you get both a large relatively dim spot, and a small, intensely bright spot. If I build a 10km diameter, tunably-concave space mirror, it'll be reflecting up to 82GW onto the surface, depending on it's alignment, and assuming the same atmospheric losses. Most of that may be diffuse, but if it can concentrate just 1% of that power onto a 1 hectare (2.5 acre) area, that'll be getting 8x the normal solar dosage - If it could deliver it to 1/10th that area, that'd be getting 82x.

So what determines peak light concentration from a concave mirror? It naively seems like you could concentrate a pretty large percentage of the total power through the focal point.

Re:"Forthcoming" ?

[Immerman]

Sorry, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know they should only be taken seriously when they prove that something is possible. They're entertainment, not science. The mirror shield episode was an excellent example of that - their failure was entirely due to incompetent implementation, rather than theoretical limitations. They had light-spots dancing all over that ship, while they should have all been focused on the same point - a computer-controlled solar concentrating array would have fried that boat like a bug under a magnifying glass - and a a sufficiently well-trained regiment of soldiers wouldn't have done much worse. Plus, as I recall they used flat mirrors, which is just another level of stupid.

Use a the right lens or concave mirror, and you can focus an image of virtually any desired size and distance (I'm unclear on exactly what the theoretical limitations are) - you just want to focus that image as small as possible at the desired distance.

Hmm, it seems like these are the relevant equations:
1/f = 1/do + 1/di , where: f = focal length, do = object distance, di = image distance
and M = hi/ho = -di/do, where M = magnification, ho = height of the object, and hi = height of the image.
With sun diameter = 696e6m at a distance of 150e9m

So it looks like you're stuck with a fixed magnification based on the relative distance to the object and the imaging plane (at least for a single-mirror configuration, it sounds like you may be able to get more impressive results with more complicated optics?). Put something 1000km away in orbit, with the sun 150e6km away, and you get a magnification of 6.7e-6, and the in-focus image of the sun would be 4.6 km across.

That's an in-focus image though - I'm not sure that's actually the plane of maximum light density. As a sanity check, the smallest possible image that could be created by kids burning wood at a distance of 10cm would be 0.5mm... that actually seems about right. (The Mythbusters boat in contrast, at a distance of 23m, could have focused that spot to about 10cm = 4" across. From 1km away, it would be 4.6m))

That's just the size of the image though - there's also the brightness to consider - and that depends purely on the size of the mirror. Use a 10km mirror, and the target area would be getting 4.7x more sun than at noon. Use a 100km mirror, and it would be receiving 472x. Of course there's a limit on how big you can make a mirror - the focal length determines the radius of curvature, and thus the maximum size, but you can get the same result with hundreds of smaller mirrors all focused on the same spot.

Do bears run in woods?

[bobbied]

Weaponization of space has been a reality since Sputnik.

Weapons were the whole POINT of the exercise by both sides though the 70's, regardless of the propaganda saying otherwise.

The treaties that keep weapons from being based in space is very clearly only limiting WMD type weapons (nuclear bombs, chemical weapons etc) but they do not address conventional weapons, anti-satellite weapons or much else for that matter.

So India's actions are not evidence of anything new, just the continued realization that national defense *requires* a significant focus on controlling space in some way. Denying your adversaries the high ground, as we used to call it.

Re:Do bears run in woods?

[Kjella]

So India's actions are not evidence of anything new, just the continued realization that national defense *requires* a significant focus on controlling space in some way. Denying your adversaries the high ground, as we used to call it.

Unfortunately it's more like a scorched earth scenario with no real prospect of cleanup, this is just one more nation that can fuck it up for everybody. Even just in LEO any mass destruction of satellites would fuck it up for a century or two. The horror scenario is someone intentionally launching a debris cloud the wrong way into GEO, since they're all in the exact same orbit it'd be like shooting them all with a shotgun creating a debris ring that'll last a million years or more. That would be a lasting problem long after we've recovered from every nuke going off here on Earth.

If India's rockets are made by their elite IT

[WCMI92]

They will explode on the launchpad.

Weapon not in Space

[Roger W Moore]

The weaponization of space if when there are weapons placed in space. The anti-satellite weapon was Earth-based. Currently, space is only used for intelligence gathering and so this is a means to potentially knock out another's ability to see what you are doing.

This sort of missile is already bad enough since destroying several satellites could create a huge amount of debris in orbit. However, putting weapons in space - which is usually what we mean by the weaponization of space - is a lot more troubling because, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. So even if they are never used they could pose a real hazard and if they are ever used then the amount of lethal debris in orbit they would create might severely limit our future access to space.

Re: Weapon not in Space

[aglider]

How do you call it when weapons reach the space on purpose?

Re: Weapon not in Space

[Highdude702]

BFR AKA Big Fucking Rockets.

Re: Weapon not in Space

[Highdude702]

I like my version better, Musk must have been high when he wrote falcon.

Space Force to the resuce!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Don't worry, citizens- the new Space Force (powered by Clean Coal®) will save the day and enforce our Space Borders!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Stupid question

[mi]

Countries will weaponize everything they can — and use it against an adversary, whenever suitable. Those who wouldn't, have lost the evolution race countless generations ago.

Did you know, that a crossbow was once believed to be so horrible a weapon, a movement was afoot to ban its use in Europe against fellow Christians?

Like, yeah, I'm gonna just let him kill me, but will not shoot him with this loaded weapon I have here, because he is a Christian like myself?

Re:Ha, that was not the only Russian one

[WindBourne]

Did not know about this one. Thanx. That was interesting.

I will say that I knew about Almaz, but I was thinking it was before the treaty, not after.

Re: Reason for test

[vasanth]

Well actually a lot of agro products are exported, so looks like India might actually be feeding other countries

Re: Reason for test

[rinka]

India actually gives a lot of aid. This one's from 2017: http://www.newindianexpress.co... The quantum of aid it gives is significantly larger than the aid given it it. We told the UK and other countries way back to STOP giving aid to us but they begged us to continue taking the aid. So, if your country gives aid to India, please please reach out to your congressmen (or whoever) and tell them to stop giving us aid. We DON'T need it.