In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by those from IMSc Chennai and TIFR Mumbai conceived of the INO, identified places around India where it could be built, finalised a spot in Theni (in Tamil Nadu), and received Rs 1,350 crore from the Union government for it, only for the project to not progress a significant distance past this point.
Nandita’s article, published in The Hindu on July 14, touches on two reasons the project was stalled: “adverse environmental impacts” and “the fear of radioactivity”. These were certainly important reasons but they’re also symptoms of two deeper causes: distrust of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and some naïvety on the scientists’ part. The article mentions the “adverse environmental impacts” only once while “the fear of radioactivity” receives a longer rebuttal — which is understandable because the former has a longer history and there’s a word limit. It bears repeating, however.
Even before work on the INO neared its beginning, people on the ground in the area were tense over the newly erected PUSHEP hydroelectric project. Environmental activists were on edge because the project was happening under the aegis of the DAE, a department notorious for its opacity and heavy-handed response to opposition. The INO collaboration compounded the distrust when hearings over a writ petition Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Vaiko filed in the Madras high court revealed the final ecological assessment report of the project had been prepared by the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), which as the law required at the time hadn’t been accredited by the Quality Council of India and was thus unfit to draft the report. Members of the INO collaboration said this shouldn’t matter because they had submitted the report themselves together with a ‘detailed project report’ prepared by TANGEDCO and a geotechnical report by the Geological Survey of India. Perhaps the scientists thought SACON was good enough, and it may well have been, but it’s not clear how submitting the report themselves should have warranted a break from the law. Given all the other roadblocks in the project’s way, this trip-up in hindsight seems to have been a major turning point.
Locals in the area around the hill, under which the INO was to be built, were also nervous about losing access to part of their grazing land and to a temple situated nearby. There was a report in 2015 that police personnel had blocked people from celebrating a festival at this temple. In an April 2015 interview with Frontline, when told that local police were also keeping herders from accessing pastureland in the foothills, INO spokesperson Naba Mondal said: “The only land belonging to INO is the 26.825 ha. INO has no interest in and no desire to block the grazing lands outside this area. In fact, these issues were discussed in great detail in a public meeting held in July 2010, clearly telling the local people this. This is recorded in our FAQ. This was also conveyed to them in Tamil.” In response to a subsequent question about “propaganda” that the project site would store nuclear waste from Tamil Nadu’s two nuclear power facilities, Mondal said: “The DAE has already issued a press statement in this regard. I do genuinely believe that this has allayed people’s concerns.”
Even at the time these replies hinted at a naïve belief that these measures would suffice to allay fears in the area about the project. There is a difference between scientists providing assurances that the police will behave and the police actually behaving, especially if the experience of the locals diverges from what members of the INO collaboration believe is the case. Members of the collaboration had promised the locals they wouldn’t lose access to grazing land; four years later, the locals still had trouble taking their word. According to an investigation I published at The Wire in 2016, there was also to be a road that bypassed the local villages and led straight to the project site, sparing villagers the noise from the trucks ferrying construction material. It was never built.
One narrative arising from within the scientific community as the project neared the start of construction was that the INO is good for the country, that it will improve our scientific literacy, keep bright minds from leaving to work on similar projects abroad, and help Indians win prestigious prizes. For the national scientific enterprise itself, the INO would make India a site of experimental physics of global importance and Indian scientists working on it major contributors to the study of neutrino physics. I wrote an article to this effect in The Hindu in 2016 and this is also what Takaaki Kajita said in Nandita’s article. But later that year, I also asked an environmental activist (and a mentor of sorts) what he was thinking. He said the scientists will eventually get what they want but that they, the activists et al., still had to do the responsible thing and protest what they perceived to be missteps. (Most scientists in India don’t get what they want but many do, most recently like the ‘Challakere Science City’.)
Curiously, both these narratives — the activist’s pessimism and the scientists’ naïvety — could have emerged from a common belief: that the INO was preordained, that its construction was fated to be successful, causing one faction to be fastidious and the other to become complacent. Of course it’s too simplistic to be able to explain everything that went wrong, yet it’s also of a piece with the fact that the INO was doomed as much by circumstance as by historical baggage. That work on the INO was stalled by an opposition campaign that included fear-mongering pseudoscience and misinformation is disagreeable. But we also need to ask whether some actors resorted to these courses of action because others had been denied them, in the past if not in the immediate present — or potentially risk the prospects of a different science experiment in future.
Physics is often far removed from the precepts of behavioural science and social justice but public healthcare is closer. There is an important parallel between the scientists’ attempts to garner public support for the project and ASHA workers’ efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to vaccinate people in remote rural areas. These latter people were distrustful of the public healthcare system: it had neglected them for several years but then it was suddenly on their doorstep, expecting them to take a supposedly miraculous drug that would cut their chances of dying of the viral disease. ASHA workers changed these people’s minds by visiting them again and again, going door to door, and enrolling members of the same community to convince people they were safe. Their efficacy is higher if they are from the same community themselves because they can strike up conversations with people that draw on shared experiences. Compare this with the INO collaboration’s belief that a press release from the DAE had changed people’s minds about the project.
Today the INO stares at a bleak future rendered more uncertain by a near-complete lack of political support.
This post benefited from Thomas Manuel’s feedback.
Tag: Challakere science city
Playing the devil’s advocate on Starlink
After SpaceX began to launch its Starlink satellite constellation to facilitate global internet coverage, astronomers began complaining that the satellites are likely to interfere with stargazing schemes, especially those of large, sensitive telescopes. Spaceflight stakeholders also began to worry, especially after SpaceX’s announcement that the Starlink constellation is in fact the precursor to a mega-constellation of at least 12,000 satellites, that it could substantially increase space traffic and complicate satellite navigation.
Neither of these concerns is unfounded, primarily because neither SpaceX nor the branch of the American government responsible for regulating payloads – so by extension the American government itself – should get to decide how to use a resource that belongs to the whole world by itself, without proper multi-stakeholder consultation. With Starlink as its instrument, and assuming the continued absence of proper laws to control how mega-constellations are to be designed and operated, SpaceX will effectively colonise a big chunk of the orbital shells around Earth. The community of astronomers has been especially vocal and agitated over Starlink’s consequences for its work, and a part of it has directed its protests against what it sees as SpaceX’s misuse of space as a global commons, and as a body of shared cultural heritage.
The idea of space as a public commons is neither new nor unique but the ideal has seldom been met. The lopsided development of spaceflight programmes around the world, but particularly in China and the US, attests to this. In the absence of an international space governance policy that is both rigid enough to apply completely to specific situations and flexible enough to adapt to rapid advancements in private spaceflight, people and businesses around the world are at the mercy of countries that possess launch vehicles, the regulatory bodies that oversee their operations and the relationship between the two (or more) governments. So space is currently physically available and profitable only to a select group of countries.
The peaceful and equitable enjoyment of space, going by the definition that astronomers find profitable, is another matter. Both the act and outcomes of stargazing are great sources of wonder for many, if not all, people while space itself is not diminished in any way by astronomers’ activities. NASA’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ platform has featured hundreds of spectacular shots of distant cosmological features captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and news of the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope is only met with awe and a nervous excitement over what new gems its hexagonal eyes will discover.
Astronomy often is and has been portrayed as an innocent and exploratory exercise that uncovers the universe’s natural riches, but closer to the ground, where the efforts of its practitioners are located, it is not so innocent. Indeed, it represents one of the major arms of modern Big Science, and one of Big Science’s principal demands is access to large plots of land, often characterised by its proponents as unused land or land deemed unprofitable for other purposes.
Consider Mauna Kea, the dormant volcano in Hawaii with a peak height of 4.2 km above sea level. Its top is encrusted with 13 telescopes, but where astronomers continued to see opportunity to build more (until the TMT became as controversial as it did), Native Hawaiians saw encroachment and destruction to an area they consider sacred. Closer home, one of the principle prongs of resistance to the India-based Neutrino Observatory, a large stationary detector that a national collaboration wants to install inside a small mountain, has been that its construction will damage the surrounding land – land that the collaboration perceives to be unused but which its opponents in Tamil Nadu (where the proposed construction site is located) see, given the singular political circumstances, as an increasingly precious and inviolable resource. This sentiment in turn draws on past and ongoing resistance to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, the proposed ISRO launchpad at Kulasekarapattinam and the Sterlite copper-smelting plant in Tamil Nadu, and the Challakere ‘science city’ in Karnataka, all along the same lines.
Another way astronomy is problematic is in terms of its enterprise. That is, who operates the telescopes that will be most affected by the Starlink mega-constellation, and with whom do the resulting benefits accrue? Arguments of the ‘fix public transport first before improving spaceflight’ flavour are certainly baseless (for principles as well as practicalities detailed here) but it would be similarly faulty for a working definition of a global commons to originate from a community of astronomers located principally in the West, for whom clear skies are more profitable than access to low-cost internet.
More specifically, to quote Prakash Kashwan, a senior research fellow at the Earth System Governance Project:
The ‘good’ in public good refers to an ‘economic good’ or a thing – as in goods and services – that has two main characteristics: non-excludability and non-rivalry. Non-excludability refers to the fact that once a public good is provided, it is difficult to exclude individuals from enjoying its benefits even if they haven’t contributed to its provisioning. Non-rivalry refers to the fact that the consumption of a public good does not negatively impact other individuals’ ability to also benefit from a public good.
In this definition, astronomy (involving the use of ground-based telescopes) has often been exclusive, whether as a human industry in its need for land and designation of public goods as ‘useless’ or ‘unused’, or as a scientific endeavour, whereby its results accrue unevenly in society especially without public outreach, science communication, transparency, etc. Starlink, on the other hand, is obviously rivalrous.
There’s no question that by gunning for a mega-constellation of satellites enveloping Earth, Musk is being a bully (irrespective of his intentions) – but it’s also true that the prospect of low-cost internet promises to render space profitable to more people than is currently the case. So if arguments against his endeavour are directed along the trajectory that Starlink satellites damage, diminish access to and reduce the usefulness of some orbital regions around Earth, instead of against the US government’s unilateral decision to allow the satellites to be launched in the first place, it should be equally legitimate to claim that these satellites also enhance the same orbital regions by extracting more value from them.
Ultimately, the ‘problem’ is also at risk of being ‘resolved’ because Musk and astronomers have shaken hands on it. The issue isn’t whether astronomers should be disprivileged to help non-astronomers or vice versa, but to consider if astronomers’ comments on the virtues of astronomy gloss over their actions on the ground and – more broadly – to remember the cons of prioritising the character of space as a source of scientific knowledge over other, more germane opportunities, and to remind everyone that the proper course of action would be to do what neither Musk and the American government nor the astronomers have done at the moment. That is, undertake public consultation, such as with stakeholders in all countries party to the Outer Space Treaty, instead of assuming that de-orbiting or anything else for that matter is automatically the most favourable course of action.