Subscribe
The red-brick, colonial-era Victoria Jubilee Townhall, or VJT Hall in Thiruvananthapuram is a well-known landmark in the heart of Kerala’s capital city. A popular venue for meetings and events, it was renamed Mahatma Ayyankali Hall in 2019 after the Dalit reformer, but it’s still better known by its 19th century moniker - or rather, its acronym.
On a typically humid Wednesday evening in early October, people walk in through the gates in twos and threes and make their way inside the vast hall with high ceilings. A banner announces why they are streaming in – for a seminar titled “ISRO’s Future - Concerns and Anxieties” organised by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Pensioners’ Association in Thiruvananthapuram. Sreekumari Amma, a retired engineer in the quality control division seated in the audience, says she came out of curiosity to hear what the speakers had to say, chiefly former chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair. Indeed, when Nair enters the hall, which has more or less filled by 5 pm, nearly everyone in the audience stands up deferentially.
The association, which has some 4,000 members, is a fairly active body but the seminar on anxieties about ISRO’s future is still somewhat unusual considering the organisers and many of the attendees – pensioners – no longer have skin in the game. Association secretary Johnson S Fernandez acknowledges as much, both in his speech on stage and later, in conversation. “What happens to ISRO now will no longer affect us. But it would sadden us if the ISRO we took pride in is getting destroyed,” he says.
“Destroyed” is a strong word. But 2026 has been an unusually challenging year for ISRO right from January, when the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), failed for the second consecutive time, belying the rocket’s reputation as a workhorse. The next launch came an uncharacteristically long nine months later, raising questions about the delay. In July, the Department of Space took the unusual step of issuing restrictions on scientists working on critical missions who wanted to quit, following a stream of such resignations, estimated to be at least 100 in the last few months.
All of this was happening at a time of unprecedented transformation in India’s space sector. With the Union government opening it up to the private sector in 2020, the number of space startups had boomed to over 400 from a single one in 2014, according to the government’s own estimates. While this was lauded in many quarters, it has also created concerns about the nature and direction of this expansion, including the role and limits of the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), set up by the government in 2020 to facilitate and regulate private sector participation. It also led to questions on the shrinking autonomy of the ISRO and the extent to which India should be relying on startups to expand its space programme.
The biggest cause for unease among employees and the trigger for that seminar itself were certain public statements by Pawan Goenka, who heads IN-SPACe. At a media event in August, Goenka said that eventually, ISRO would stop manufacturing launch vehicles, including the PSLVs – it would all be done by the private sector. Responding to his interlocutor’s question on when ISRO would take on a role similar to NASA (the US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and give a lot of its work to the private sector, Goenka said: “Eventually, ISRO will not manufacture any launch vehicles – it will all be done by the private sector or PSUs. They will not do day-in, day-out kind of satellites. They’ll do satellites for special purposes … and develop new technology, which will then get transferred to (the) private sector,” he had said.