Tag: Rahul Menon

The UAE’s hacks for international prominence

The UAE seems to be making a sincere attempt to whitewash itself, according to a New York Times report on September 1, by hosting the COP28 climate talks. This is both unsurprising and fascinating – both because we’ve seen this in the local cosmopolitan self-image the country has sought to build. This is perhaps most overt with Dubai, but Abu Dhabi and Sharjah as well: while the former, with its surfeit of tourist attractions, seems keen to appear to be from the future, as they say, all three cities have been erected on a migrant labour force, especially from the Indian subcontinent, that is otherwise kept hidden from sight. The country is also the personal fiefdom of the emirs of each emirate and has no interest or room for critical dialogues on most matters of any import – a point that the newspaper’s report also makes:

“That’s the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the U.A.E. acting as host of the annual global climate conference,” said Devin Kenney, who researches the United Arab Emirates for Amnesty International. “How are you supposed to have a serious discussion about a critical problem for all humanity in a country where critical discussion is illegal?”

As far as taking responsibility for major events to launder one’s international reputation goes, the UAE’s previous attempt was its Mars mission. In July 2020, the country ‘launched’ a probe named ‘Hope’ to the red planet, which successfully achieved orbital capture in February 2021. Emaratis celebrated the occasion in much the same way Indians had with the Mars Orbiter Mission, and such celebration was probably the mission’s primary objective. The UAE’s spaceflight organisation was actually founded in 2014; the probe was assembled in the University of Colorado, by engineers from the UAE as well as from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley; its ground-segment requirements are being met by NASA and a private entity in Arizona; and it was tested in and launched by Japan, onboard its H-IIA rocket.

‘Hope’ was not a product of the UAE’s space programme because the UAE doesn’t have a space programme the way India, China, Russia, Japan or the US have a space programme. Yet the UAE reaped a reputational windfall out of the exercise, thrusting itself into the ranks of countries that have successfully conducted interplanetary missions, and giving its citizens and ‘permanent residents’ something to cheer about.

Recently, in an opinion article in The Hindu, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy associate professor Rahul Menon used the ‘Hope’ mission as an example of a country with a lower population (and thus relatively lower availability of highly skilled persons in diverse fields) achieving what India, China, etc. had because of state intervention, towards his larger point that such intervention is also capable of yielding desirable outcomes. But the UAE is a red herring in this arena whose state did nothing more than fork out a considerable sum of (what is essentially family) money, fly out some of its best engineers to the US, contract a rocket in Japan, and wait. Seldom having seen the country do better, I bet it’s trying to pull a similar trick with COP28.

Checking the validity of a ‘valid’ ISRO question

The question of whether resources directed to space programmes are a diversion from pressing development needs, however, is a valid one. As an answer, one can uphold the importance of these programmes in material and scientific terms. The knowledge gleaned from these missions will contribute to human progress, and ISRO’s demonstration of its ability to launch satellites at relatively low costs can attract business and revenue from private players.

This passage appears in an opinion article by Rahul Menon, an associate professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University, published in The Hindu on August 28. The overall point of the article, with which I agree, is that state intervention can also lead to positive outcomes. This said, I strongly disagree with this passage. What Menon has called a valid question is, in my view, not valid at all.

First, it presumes that space programmes can’t be part of “pressing development needs”, which is false. For example, a space programme with an indigenous capacity to build satellites and rockets and to launch them is a prerequisite for easing access to long-distance communications. This is an important reason why television is such a highly penetrative media in India, and has helped achieve many cultural and social transformations.

Second, Menon’s statement also presumes that a space programme subtracts from “pressing development needs”. This is true – insofar as we also agree that the resources we have allocated for the “needs” are limited. I don’t: the simple reason is that the budget estimate for the Department of Space in 2023-2024 is 0.27% of the total estimate for the same period. Even if “pressing development needs” constitute a (arbitrarily) highly conservative 10% of the remainder, the claim that India’s space programme stresses it by reducing it to 9.73% strains belief. In addition, development needs are also met by state governments and often with some help from the private sector.

The real problem here is that the national government has not allocated enough to the “needs”, leading to a conservative fiscal imagination that perceives the space programme to be wasteful.

These are the two points of disagreement vis-à-vis the first sentence of the excerpted portion. The third point has to do with the third sentence: the Department of Space has done well to separate ISRO’s scientific programmes from commercial ventures; NewSpace India, Ltd. exists for the latter. This is important so as to not valorise ISRO’s ability to launch satellites at low cost, which is harmful because, in the spaceflight sector specifically, a) reducing the manufacturing and launch costs to maintain a market advantage is a terrible trade-off, given the safety implications, and b) we don’t yet know the difference that access to cheaper labour in India makes to the difference in costs between ISRO and other space agencies.

In sum, “the question of whether resources directed to space programmes are a diversion from pressing development needs” is a strawman.