Your initial comment was knee-jerk and symptomatic of the typical response that greets advanced space/rocket programs from a developing country like India - namely that it has other more pressing issues like poverty, hunger, economic development, corruption etc. to tackle before getting to space exploration.

As others have pointed out, these are not pre-requisites for a space program. And given that the $100M expenditure (Flipkart raised $160M in funding from the same country a few days back), there is no chance that it is diverting precious resources from the rest of India.

Which brings me to the latter part of your comment - that ISRO does not know how to "compete" with private space startups.

Tell me, why did you suddenly impose the private-profit constraint on India's sovereign space program? Sure ISRO derives some revenue from its commercial launch program, but that is not its primary purpose.

Investments into a country's space program (or any other strategic initiative for that matter) can rarely ever be recouped via "profits". Are NASA engineers working round the clock to compete with Space-X? Is the primary goal of the Chinese space program's to garner the largest commercial launch market share?

All of this does not mean ISRO is above criticism, nor its Mars program. For instance, why the hurry to make this happen in 2013? Why go alone instead of allying with friendly countries? Why not wait for the larger GSLV rocket to place this into orbit instead of the smaller PSLV? Why such opaque decision making around its objectives?

The latter part of this Science article covers some of these points: http://news.sciencemag.org/asia/2012/08/qualms-about-indias-...