Tapan Misra

I think, different organisations, industries, universities, and research labs follow a common law akin to second law of thermodynamics. They take heat energy in the form of investments, bank loans, endowments, government or private grants, planned fund allocation in the government programmes. They generate products and processes but also create entropy or information in terms of random ideas, free for all research programmes, technical lectures, presentations or sheer wastage of man, machine and money.

Indian software behemoths maintain a tight leash on projects and manpower to maximise revenue and profit and minimise entropy or knowledge generation, to boost efficiency. They contribute heavily to Indian and global economy, digitisation of economic, social and administrative exchange and immense employment generation. In spite of their girth and height, their name hardly get associated with a significant software package for which our country should be proud of.

Take a look at renowned engineering colleges. They are staffed with bright minds. Their main product is graduating students, who feed to various industries as employees. Their entropy is disjointed, freewheeling research and generally loosely executed technical projects. But due to absence of suitable mechanisms or leaderships at various lower levels, hardly any of them could make any significant technology contribution by harnessing their research activity.

The pride of the nation, ISRO, has adopted different strategy. They started with primitive rockets. But they reinvested their entropy i.e., acquired knowledge, to build more and more sophisticated rockets. In the process they generated more entropy or information or knowledge which enabled them for gradual foray into all segments of space technology, like satellites, satellite tracking, various payloads like satcom, radar imaging, navigation, optical cameras, instruments for weather monitoring from space, reusable launch vehicles, many newer instrumentations, rocket engines, mission to other celestial bodies. The list is pretty long.

ISRO’s is a trailblazing story, but for brief periods, for example the organisation in recent years has been rocked by the Antrix-Devas scam and also the issue of leadership deficit during the tenure of the previous Chairman of ISRO

Editorial comment

ISRO did something right. They invested in imaginative leadership at various levels to collate and focus acquired knowledge to build newer and newer product and service portfolio.

Though ISRO may be staffed with engineers from not so glamourous colleges from Indian hinterland, they may not be great revenue earner, they still became cynosure of the nation.

The author, Tapan Misra, is founder of SISIR Radar. He is a distinguished scientist. He was Director Space Applications Centre and is recognised globally as father of Indian SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radars)