The turf war between the private
sector and India’s space agency
ISRO heats up

In a replay of the same turf war that occurred in the U.S. in the 2010s when NASA first began shifting away from building everything itself to instead using the capitalism model to hire the private sector to do the job, the employee associations from nine different facilities run by India’s space agency ISRO last week issued a public letter demanding that the Modi government reassure them that their jobs are secure and that the work they do building rockets will continue forever.

In a letter dated September 4, the associations questioned what role ISRO would retain under the proposed changes and raised concerns over the impact on existing employees, sanctioned posts, vacancies and future recruitment. The associations referred to remarks made by Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) chairman Pawan Goenka on August 21, in which he said ISRO would eventually stop manufacturing launch vehicles, with such activities being undertaken by private companies or public sector undertakings.

The employee bodies said no official communication had accompanied the remarks explaining the policy framework, legal basis, implementation timeline or implications for the workforce. They sought clarity on whether the design, development, integration, testing and launch of vehicles such as the PSLV, LVM3 and SSLV would continue to remain with ISRO. They also asked how the proposed changes would affect recruitment of scientific, technical, administrative and industrial personnel across ISRO centres.

The Modi government has for the past six years been pushing to encourage an independent competing private sector, while applying strong pressure on ISRO to transfer much of its rocket industry to that sector. In 2020 it created IN-SPACe, a government agency expressly tasked with making that shift happen. As part of this shift, IN-SPACe forced ISRO to shift the management of both its SSLV rocket and its new spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam to private companies. It is also working to do the same with ISRO’s LVM3 rocket.

The letter from these ISRO employee associations is the typical pushback seen from every government union whenever such transitions take place. The employees’ careers are not really threatened, as all they need to do is find work in the new private sector, and that should not be hard for them to do with ISRO on their resumes.

The real threat is to the existence of these union associations, and so they act to whip up political fury to stop the change. Not surprisingly, the press in India picked up this letter with numerous stories, which in turn forced ISRO to issue a clarification, stating the agency’s future remains secure.

Despite that clarification, it does appear the Modi government is not backing down and will continue this transition to capitalism. The head of ISRO yesterday added his own thoughts, noting that while he wished to reassure ISRO’s workers, it remains essential that the private sector must grow and ISRO’s job is to help make that happen.

Expect this battle to continue for the next decade or so, until that private space sector in India gets strong enough to stand on its own feet. When that happens, the battle will end, because everyone will see how much better things are when freedom and private enterprise is allowed to function. That’s what has happened in the the U.S. The same will happen in India.