NEW DELHI—India's space officials were expecting a friendly get-together with the prime minister on 9 May to review images from a new satellite, but instead they got probing questions. The normally soft-spoken head of state, Manmohan Singh, demanded to know why satellites of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) were of no use in locating a recent air crash. On 30 April, a helicopter carrying Dorjee Khandu, chief minister of the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, went down near the border with Bhutan. ISRO—whose Earth-imaging operation includes a search-and-rescue function—was unable to find the wreckage. Villagers on foot found it 5 days later; Khandu did not survive.
The reason for the delay, ISRO Chair K. Radhakrishnan told Singh, was that the rainforest site was under heavy cloud cover and couldn't be seen. Nor did India's RISAT-II, an Israeli-made cloud-penetrating radar satellite with a resolution of 1 meter, offer help.
Tarnished image. ISRO Chair K. Radhakrishnan (left) and V. K. Dadhwal (right), director of the National Remote Sensing Centre, were cross-examined by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (center) when they briefed him on 9 May.
CREDIT: SHIVRAJ/GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
“We worked day and night but failed to identify the crash site,” Radhakrishnan acknowledged in an interview with Science. He said that ISRO initially was misled by incorrect information from local authorities and by “false signals” caused by steep, mountainous terrain. The incident tarnished ISRO's image. A 5 May banner on The Times of India read, “Villagers Succeed Where Hi-Tech Failed.”
ISRO was already under fire for the alleged inefficiency of its 10-satellite Earth-observing system, one of the world's largest. Critics say that it is expensive, poorly managed, and saddled with security restrictions that stifle its use by researchers and companies.
Some of these criticisms came to the fore in April when government auditors handed Parliament a scathing 57-page review of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) in Hyderabad, ISRO's Earth-observing arm. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) conducted a “performance audit” of seven remote-sensing satellites over 7 years and found that they had been built without an adequate assessment of need. The system lacked an “appropriate marketing strategy,” CAG found. And CAG faulted the network for “delays in data processing.”
NRSC was meant to support national remote-sensing projects on food and water security, conversion of wastelands into usable land, and disaster management. But CAG faulted ISRO for poor interagency coordination. For example, CAG noted, the Ministry of Rural Development entrusted NRSC to map the inventory of wasteland using satellites in 1986. It took 14 years to produce the maps. NRSC says the pace was slow in part because it failed to get timely input from the Ministry of Rural Development. The bottom line, according to CAG, is that “inadequate co-ordination contributed to non-reclamation of 86.5 % of the targeted wastelands.”
Another vexing issue is the system's low usage rate. CAG found that 89% of all remote-sensing images in the collection are “idling,” or lying unused in NRSC archives. V. Jayaraman, who until April was director of NRSC, says weather is partly to blame: “A third of the time, India is cloud-covered during the monsoons, during which time images yield nothing but yet have to be stored.”
The CAG report says that between 2002 and 2009, India spent almost $551 million to design and launch the seven satellites it examined; in this period NRSC sold data worth about $39 million, recovering 7% of that expenditure. The CAG report says this was not even enough to “match its yearly operational expenditure.” Radhakrishnan acknowledges that CAG's numbers are accurate but says that the system was not meant to pay for itself: “Nowhere [in the world] is remote sensing a commercially viable service.”
The biggest headache for companies and nonprofit researchers hoping to use satellite images may be India's 2001 Remote Sensing Data Policy. It gives NRSC a monopoly within India to control access to images with less than 5.8-meter resolution—not just images from Indian satellites but also those from foreign sources. The policy is “primitive,” says Arup Dasgupta, managing editor of Geospatial World, based here, who spent 35 years at ISRO working on remote sensing. Furthermore, Dasgupta says, the policy is “unimplementable, as it only hampers the policy-abiders, not the policy bypassers.” (India does not block Google Earth images on the Internet.)
Thomas Snitch, a consultant to the GeoEye Foundation, a Herndon, Virginia–based remote-sensing nonprofit, agrees that the policy is a major problem. In an e-mail, he wrote that, “If an Indian researcher or student applies to the GeoEye Foundation for free imagery, I must turn them down unless they have an NRSC license.” There was a time when India rejected applications by citing the need to protect national security, he notes. But applications are often “summarily denied with little or no justification” and no line of appeal. At the same time, Snitch says, would-be buyers may be contacted by ISRO's commercial arm, the Antrix Corp., and informed that they can buy Antrix imagery. “I know of no other nation that operates in this manner,” Snitch says.
Kumar Navulur of DigitalGlobe Inc. in Longmont, Colorado, a company that owns imaging satellites, has a more charitable view. He says India needs to balance defense and commercial interests and weigh each case individually, as “programs are designed to get the right intelligence at the right time.”
It is true, Radhakrishnan says, that because of the 2001 policy, ISRO cannot freely disseminate remote-sensing data that has a resolution of less than 5.8 meters. But he indicates that “the remote-sensing policy is being reviewed.”
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