ISRO’s commercial success is clear but its strategic aims require it to focus on talent retention

It was a telecom orbiter, designed to facilitate connectivity, for an American firm taken on as a client. Such commercial launches are just one aspect of India’s space success driven by a government-funded programme run by Isro that has scientific and strategic aims as well.

Its placing of such a heavy satellite in low earth orbit (LEO) affirms Isro’s global role as a low-cost competitor for high-end services. Competition within the country, however, is set to multiply. In 2020, India opened its space sector to private investment.

Since then, some 400 domestic startups have come up for assorted space activities, ranging from rockets and satellites to space propulsion systems and aides for navigation. As this could catapult the market ahead, it is welcome.

Yet, we can also expect startups to start poaching talent from Isro, with engineers and scientists who have done pioneering work as prime targets. Without an innovative talent retention policy, our space agency risks losing valuable human resources.

One response could be to treat talent development as a key part of our public space programme. We could look at it as a positive externality created by the state to foster the rise of a thriving market in India for space services. From this perspective, there is no particular need to retain trained talent at Isro.

Rather, it could hire young engineers in droves to train for the private sector’s eventual benefit on the logic that the latter’s emergence will serve the country well through competitive efficiency. This would be fine for junior-level talent. But Isro needs expertise and leadership for itself.

To secure itself on this front, it must revamp its remuneration structure. Right now, pay scales for Isro scientists are mapped to civil-service salaries, with two classes paid higher than the Union cabinet secretary. Still, their compensation is puny compared to what stock options awarded by businesses to star performers could work out to.

Since such employees do not wield power or shape policy that can transform millions of lives, factors that remunerate our civil-service officers beyond their pay packets, they may well be open to moving jobs.

Stories of startup founders, funders and key employees encashing their shares through initial public offerings to get fabulously rich would not be lost on our space scientists, even if their focus is mostly not on this planet.

Isro is both a research and development organization seeking to advance space science and technology.

At the same time, its satellite launch business is a commercial venture that faces rising competition, even as Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites in LEO evoke both imitation and hostility; after all, they have given Ukraine’s soldiers a tactical advantage in battle that Russia seems keen to wipe out by developing anti-satellite tech.

Even our orbiters need to devise protection: apart from monitors, defensive gear and threat-evasive manoeuvrability, we need a new pact among space powers against all forms of space warfare. Faced with new challenges, our space agency must do its utmost to keep its top talent in place.

Given its critical relevance to India’s strategic autonomy, nobody can grudge bumped-up pay scales for vital roles at Isro. The same logic, of course, applies to public-sector defence enterprises as well.