Why ISRO will attract more students from IITs in future

If I had to pick the most significant year from the history of our space age, it would be 1969. On July 20 that year, the three-member crew from NASA’s Apollo 11 mission successfully landed on the moon. Five decades after that, we still use the word moonshot to describe something with a remote chance of success but done anyway. In the same year, NASA did something else very interesting that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. The American space agency honoured four scientists -- Kurt Debus, Eberhard Rees, Arthur Rudolph, and Wernher von Braun with its highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal. These four gentlemen, apart from being part of NASA for a couple of decades, had one more thing in common. They were part of Operation Paperclip, a special US military ops executed at the end of World War II, to bring terribly talented Nazi scientists to the United States to work for the United States government.

I recall this story because Dr S Somanath, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, in recent interviews, said that IITians are unwilling to join the space agency due to poor pay. Thanks to RTIs and other news reports, we know that the chairman of ISRO himself draws a salary of Rs 2.5 lakh a month, which is what a mid-level IT professional can expect to earn in India today. He said when his team tried to hire from an IIT campus, more than half of them simply walked out after seeing ISRO’s pay structure.

Before getting into ISRO HR’s budgetary constraints, let’s try and look at the big picture here. Though NASA was officially born in 1958, its roots can be traced back to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was formed in 1915. So one may say that it took NASA all of five and half decades from the word go to place man on the moon, interestingly, the same year ISRO was founded. After the stupendous Chandrayaan-3 success, we are now preparing to land an Indian on the moon by 2040, or around seven decades after establishing ISRO.

This comparison may sound a bit cruel and even unfair, given that India had bigger battles to fight immediately after Independence, and space missions were not exactly our priority. And yet we have achieved so much in the last five-odd decades and at budgets that are a fraction of European and American space agencies. If ISRO can achieve so much with one hand tied to its back, imagine what it can without being able to hire any talent it wishes.

India is nearly a $4 trillion economy and has never been economically stronger than it is today, at least since her Independence. Our subsidy budget this fiscal alone is going to be in excess of Rs 5.6 lakh crore or roughly $63 billion. ISRO’s current annual budget is just around $1.5 billion. For every rupee we are spending on our space missions, we are doling out Rs 42 as subsidies, a lot of which cannot be economically defended. This is not to even suggest that we do away with all our subsidies. With a per capita income of around $2,400, India is not ready for a society where every citizen is left to his/her own devices with no state support whatsoever. Even the United States, with over $76,000 per capita, helps its citizens with food stamps and other support services.

ISRO is our national treasure. It is perhaps one of the very few tax-payer-funded institutions that is universally beloved. As an Indian, I believe there are very few things in life that are as inspiring as it is to see the tricolour on our rockets.

All this brings us to a more pertinent question. Would it really make such a big difference if we had more IITians in ISRO? The fact that the ISRO team does go to IIT for campus hiring kind of answers the question. I would expect ISRO leadership to know where to look for the best talent. Not being able to hire whom they want is a challenge they did not create.

There is a universal appeal to high-quality skills. They are rare, and whoever gets them also gets a competitive advantage, no matter which field it may be. I would also imagine that many more IITians would choose ISRO over Silicon Valley if only their pay came anywhere near comparable. For the first few decades, we were quite helpless in fighting the massive brain drain we had to suffer due to a weak economy that offered little to no serious career for the better among us. That is not the situation anymore. Good talents are able to find great careers right here at home. If India continues on its current economic trajectory, the H1-B visa will not be a priced commodity for long.

ISRO has time and again proven that it can deliver. Its team also knows how to do that on shoestring budgets. This is the same country where the national carrier Air India’s losses in FY22, the year before Tatas took over, was around Rs 9,500 crore, just a bit less than ISRO’s budget. Freeing ISRO from hiring constraints may be the big push it needs. NASA’s feverish pace of growth was driven by America’s cold war with the USSR. We don’t need any such external push to be more generous with ISRO’s budget.

Author is Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-founder, Scaler & InterviewBit

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