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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

In highly developed countries there is a lot of discussion about the large disparity between the poor and the rich, but India seems to dwarf just everything by orders of magnitude. Every time I read about India's space program I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.

UPDATE: I just want to clarify - I don't want to judge this as good or bad, I just want to express that I am unable to bend my mind around that.

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This question is getting tiresome. ISRO gathers data on crop yields, irrigation, forest cover, and weather, all of which benefit regular Indians. ISRO is why India is on the verge of launching it's own GPS system. ISRO is one of the cheaper options for satellite launches worldwide. ISRO is profitable. None of that was visible when India's space program started. The same criticisms would have applied even back then, so perhaps you should cut them a little slack on this project, which costs all of $75MM by the way.

Response to having a space program while having poverty: http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Pove...

Please scroll down a bit because the awesome part comes after the subhead: Why India needs a MARS program.

Is that supported by the majority of the population? Naively I would expect that people would prefer immediate improvements over long term benefits.

Seriously guys, how can you downvote a question like that? It's a real question with a real answer and not irrelevant in this context.

India does have a lot of domestic and economic policies to bring people out of poverty. The said policies however are at the mercy of politicians who are corrupt and do not deliver.

India spends 0.2% on space exploration and 12% on defence. If you want to complain about misaligned priorities complain about our defence that takes up the most resources but does very little indigenous development rather than our space program that costs next to nothing but develops a lot of indigenous technology.

Thats an awesome article. ISRO can be an inspiration not just to young kids but many other private/government agencies in doing technologically advanced things.

There are poor and downtrodden in about every country of this world. Yet most residents will more readily question how a neighboring country handles this situation than of their own.

I do not know of any country which does space launches can claim there is no poverty, or need, within their borders.

The reason people in my country are poor is because of the government's economic policy. India is a very resource rich country otherwise. The country still recovering from its earlier backward economic policies [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Indi...

That's a rather naïve point of view. Try to replace "space program" with something else that isn't immediately saving lives - such as any kind of art.

There are multi billion scams exposed once every month. The money spent on space exploration is negligible for people to make a big fuss about it.

> I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.

It's a matter of priorities. Nations seem to want to spend money on looking impressive and technologically advanced to other nations and place that as a higher priority than their own citizens. Historically, space programs are also used to remind their neighbors that 'hey, we can put a robot in orbit of a rock millions of miles away, we can sure as hell put a bomb on your door step.' That's who they're trying to impress and what they're trying to drive home.

Fuck the poor seems to be something of a universal position.

by that logic, we indians should stop all progress wait for every poor person to reach at-least middle class and then bring technologies into our country. sounds to me pretty short sighted approach. What if instead of that we teach poor kids and create tomorrows "astronauts" and ISRO scientists.

Really? Suggesting that India not spend so much reminding Pakistan and China that they can drop a nuclear weapon on them anywhere they feel like it is the same as saying India should spend no money on anything except giving people money.

Interesting.

Sorry, I choose to ignore "war" rhetorics. If China wants to drop "nuclear" bomb it will. Our low-cost attempts at reaching "Mars" will not stop it . "MAD" policies have a limit as shown in "cold war", diplomacy has more merits :)

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