Tag: Mars Orbiter

Curious Bends – Mars Orbiter, friendly elephants, waterless urinals and more

Special look: India’s Mars Orbiter Mission

1. One small step for India may become a big step for humanity

“Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal, expects that humans will have settlements on Mars within two centuries. But he is not sure if Western countries can achieve this. It will need the determination of nations such as India and China. Or, perhaps like the International Space Station, it will have to be a global collaboration where each country brings in expertise and money to build a sustainable colony beyond Earth.” (4 min read)

2. India’s Mars Orbiter has made it to the top, but is it a one-hit wonder?

“Even if it has launched a spacecraft to Mars, the payload limit and the lack of an inclusive scientific agenda still stand in the way of taking full advantage of scientific interest and infrastructure on the ground. Going ahead, untying this knot is what will keep from reducing MOM’s achievement to an exhibition of ego rather than scientific temperament.” (4 min read)

3. No room for jugaad on Mars

“ISRO built a top-class launch vehicle and payload, and we should not cheapen its success by harping on any number. India’s space programme is a testament to a culture of tackling hard challenges because they are hard, not because they are easy. Of doing the best, and not the cheapest. Jugaad in India was born as a necessity in impoverished conditions, and instead of elevating it to godhood we should be trying to escape a culture of jugaad as quickly as possible. ISRO is showing us the way.” (4 min read)

In other news

1. Elephants can learn to live with humans, and a Darwinian explanation might not suffice

When forest officials dug a protective trench around a reserve in South India, an elephant named Bharathan took to the highway, scared off a guard and carefully stepped around a checkpost. In another instance, Bharathan waited for a local jackfruit vendor to take a break before raiding his stock. His stories regale local villagers. However, his behaviour has left both biologists and anthropologists scrambling for an explanation. (8 min read)

2. Exploit urinals for cheap fertilisers, says Indian inventor

Human urine contains three nutrients essential for plant growth: phosphorous, potassium and nitrogen. According to an Indian inventor, each person produces four to five kilograms of these nutrients annually. He believes that is reason enough to replace modern “flush and forget” sanitation systems with waterless urinals that he has designed. They separate, store and transport these elements for use in fertilisers. (3 min read)

3. Monsanto is expanding its offerings in India but will farmers trust it?

Monsanto, the “agri-tech company the world loves to hate”, is moving into a market that Indian farmers could do with. It plans to offer them an integrated suite of services, especially merging agriculture and Big Data to provide remote sensing, modelling and marketing options to growers. However, whether its services will sell is another question because of two concerns. One: Monsanto’s reputation in India is bad at best. Two: India’s data-protection laws are virtually non-existent. (4 min read)

Chart of the week

One in every nine persons in the world goes hungry, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation. It estimates that since 1990, the number of hungry people globally has declined by over 200 million, helping the world meet one of its Millennium Development Goals. However, the unevenness of progress means food security is increasingly dependent on political will. The biggest strides have been taken in Southeast Asia, East Asia and Latin America; the smallest, in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Down To Earth has more.

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The dignity of human labor

My Twitter friend and compatriot @zeusisdead made a good, bristling case for why we shouldn’t celebrate India’s Mars Orbiter mission’s frugality. Here’s a telling excerpt from his piece as it appeared in Times of India:

ISRO [India’s space agency] did not get to Mars by using duct tape and M-seal to make the orbiter work. ISRO is not trying to repair cars by refashioning cycle chains. It takes several minutes for the ISRO command centre to beam a message to the orbiter and an equal length of time to hear back. The “thoda adjust kardenge” attitude of jugaad with people tinkering on the fly would have failed like a wet cracker here. ISRO built a top-class launch vehicle and payload, and we should not cheapen its success by harping on any number. India’s space programme is a testament to a culture of tackling hard challenges because they are hard, not because they are easy. Of doing the best, and not the cheapest. Jugaad in India was born as a necessity in impoverished conditions, and instead of elevating it to godhood we should be trying to escape a culture of jugaad as quickly as possible. ISRO is showing us the way.

For those who don’t know much Hindi, including me, “jugaad” means to hack something together in a very creative, sometimes cunning, sense.

Anyway, there is perhaps a simpler explanation for why the Mars Orbiter worked out so cheap (it does find mention in @zeusisdead’s piece). Having moved to the United States less than a month ago, I was expected to be alarmed by the cost of many products and amenities by my relatives already living in the country. They converted every dollar into rupees and were in a perpetual state of astonishment when it all worked out 60 times costlier. But then, they were careful to note the exceptions: medicines, books, public transport, shipping, and most of all tips. These things worked out way costlier than they ought to, they said.

I’m much more comfortable in the United States, and it’s not in spite of these “costlier” things, it’s because of them. In my opinion, they make it easier for me to acknowledge the dignity of human labor. It’s the cost of labor that escalates the cost of certain products and services. Medicines bought at the pharmacy or books downloaded from the web may be cheaper but they ought to be more expensive if you want to have them delivered home. Fuel is cheaper, too, if you can be honest about how much you’re filling up for and are able to do it yourself, but if the bunk has to manned, who pays those who man it? That’s the price we ought to pay to respect the dignity of human labor.

In the same way, as an organization operating out of India, ISRO has to spend much less than the developed world to consume manhours. And that the price of a manhour is low in India is not as a natural product of our socio-economic forces but as a result of deliberate subsidization whose costs we hide behind a veil of cheapness. It is in this sense that Modi’s call to ‘Make In India’ sounds ominous, too. Labor shouldn’t come cheap, but if it does, who’s paying for it? In the words of American economist Thorstein Veblen,

Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making something beautiful or useful – to be treated with dignity and respect, as brother and sister.