The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is being poisoned by politicisation. With each passing year of late, it is a darker shadow of its once-formidable self, on the brink of a history in which it is no longer an engine of national growth.
In the recent past, the organisation has suffered a non-trivial number of high-profile launch anomalies and issues with spacecraft, including the PSLV-C61 and NVS-02 missions. Space is hard and such failures are not uncommon, but the almost steady clip of setbacks together with ISRO’s dispiritingly opaque public posture in the aftermath have raised concerns about systemic issues. In tandem, while the Indian space programme has introduced new commercial and policy initiatives, ISRO’s own launch frequency and scientific output have not increased.
To make matters worse, the Department of Space revealed in the second week of July that ISRO had received “a spate of requests” for resignation and voluntary retirement from Group-A scientific and technical personnel associated with Gaganyaan and other important missions. The Department added in a memo that such requests must no longer be accepted as a matter of routine.
Supporting private enterprise
Contrary to some political rhetoric, start-ups will not substitute for ISRO’s increasingly noticeable failings. A strong private sector tends to emerge from a strong public ecosystem, rather than by displacing it. The foremost need is for the state to be the private sector’s anchor customer, a responsibility the state has thus far assumed to a remarkably minor degree.
India also does not present enough domestic demand for satellite manufacturers and launch companies to subsist on. While venture capital’s appetite for Indian spaceflight is increasing, its interests are also better served by software-like growth trajectories. Launch vehicles and spacecraft manufacturing on the other hand need patient capital, present uncertain returns, and need rigorous regulatory oversight — which developmental finance is designed to absorb.
Many start-ups initially recruit from ISRO, but when ISRO itself ceases to replenish its talent, both public and private sectors suffer. Indeed, it has become an institution consuming the technical knowledge it has accumulated over decades faster than it is being replenished. The government can no longer expect it to deliver increasingly ambitious technical outcomes while allowing the underlying stressors — including staffing, autonomy, transparency, pay, and technical leadership — to persist or even worsen.
Tacit knowledge
In the previous era, ISRO’s strength was rooted in its engineers’ power to say when a system was ready. But as it has become more politically salient, its major launches have become national events and political commitments in their own right and its engineering culture has become more pressure-driven, with unsurprising consequences for the psychological culture. Complex engineering organisations like ISRO depend on junior people feeling comfortable saying, “I think we are making a mistake.” But if they start to be concerned about how bad news will be received, they will simply elect to not escalate concerns.
Rocket science itself depends to a relatively great degree on tacit knowledge. A propulsion engineer may know ISRO adopted a particular weld specification after an obscure vibration issue 15 years ago, and such knowledge will not appear in the documentation. But accelerating retirements, delays in recruitment, and the departure of experienced people will also have eroded ISRO’s traditional culture of apprenticeship.
For as long as ISRO answered to Parliament, scientific and engineering peers, and the press, failure analysis reports and its researchers’ technical output were implicitly expected to withstand independent checks. While ISRO still answers to Parliament et al. on paper, accountability has flowed increasingly internal and increasingly vertical over the last decade, however, as failure analysis reports have been kept out of the public domain while its public communications have increasingly favoured promotional messaging over technical details.
Cart before horse
NASA and Roscosmos both experienced versions of this change, as did Boeing’s commercial aircraft division. And as in those countries, the suffering is a symptom of a specific failure that is hard to diagnose in the here and now but which becomes obvious when the expected outcomes are confined to niches rather than becoming sustained.
Specifically, the country lacks mutually reinforcing institutions in the form of a technically excellent public agency, universities producing specialised talent, public research laboratories, reliable procurement, long-term financing, domestic customers presenting sufficient demand, and suppliers that can manage cyclical demand. In fact, India may have tried to liberalise the space economy before it built the industrial ecosystem that liberalisation presupposes.
Sans course correction, we must expect to have a weakening ISRO, a clutch of capable but relatively small private firms, continued dependence on the state (or even foreign suppliers) for the most advanced technologies, fewer scientists looking for long careers in the public sector, and a progressively fragmented ecosystem.
Extractive state
The decline was not sudden and it was not inevitable. It has been sustained by a series of political and administrative choices that demanded more from ISRO without strengthening the institution itself. When the launch cadence had to increase, the engineering capacity did not. (Many launches slotted for 2026 are already delayed while NavIC is practically defunct.) When the strategic responsibilities multiplied, the workforce did not. When scientists resigned, the official memo restricted resignations instead of requiring authorities to discover and resolve the reasons they were leaving. When scientific or commercial missions failed, the transparency dropped. When the state pushed commercial activity, it did so without first ensuring the anchor institution was becoming stronger.
A healthy state must protect its institutions from short-term pressures by giving them more money, autonomy, and legal authority, stable careers, and political cover when things go wrong. The Indian state did just this for much of ISRO’s history, but in the last decade or so, it has replaced its nurturing stewardship with a mandate that has treated, and still treats, ISRO as an asset to be mobilised. Rather than a productive state that continually enlarges the capacities of the institutions it governs, we have an extractive state that consumes those capacities to satisfy immediate fiscal, political, and strategic objectives.
Institutions do not sustain themselves. They need to be sustained or they will cannibalise themselves.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Published – July 25, 2026 08:30 am IST
