A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though that was so damn cool — and because I thought I made my point a little better via e-mail than in the original post — here’s the text of the interview, with Meg’s permission:
Meg White: Your blog entry about the space program seems critical of the lack of humanitarian involvement by the Indian government. I’m wondering if this was a reaction to a particular event, or something you observed in India. Is there a story you can share that brought you to this conclusion? (Also, when exactly were you in India?)
Flickering Pictures: I wouldn’t say it was a reaction to a particular event, though my five weeks there over the summer of 2007 was a real slap in the head for an over-consuming middle-class Westerner like me.
But if I had to pick one flick-of-the-lightswitch event, it might be my stopover at Mumbai airport on a many-legged trip from Dharamsala to Manipal, when I was sitting in a gorgeous newly renovated glass-and-steel terminal and picked up a copy of the Mumbai Mirror – a hobnobby sort of newspaper with a wealthy target audience. The lead story was on leptospirosis – a disease that comes from drinking water contaminated with human and animal urine – which was killing people in the streets during the monsoon. Buried near the back of the paper was an opinion piece on a debate about whether or not to bulldoze a slum and forcibly relocate its residents outside of town. Those in favour of demolition had enlisted movie stars and other celebrities to lobby the city, and insisted that Mumbai would be a cleaner, safer, less disease-prone place if the poor were tossed outside the city limits. Those against argued that the cost would be prohibitive, and that the people who lived there would just end up elsewhere in the city. No one brought up the ethical question of whether it’s okay to wreck thousands of homes just because they happen to be made of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting.
That moral blind spot is reflected in the government’s priority-setting – in its push to join the community of developed nations, it’s simply focusing on the developed bits and hoping the rest will go away. And the fact is there are hundreds of millions of near-destitute Indians who will not go away, and who need government-funded education, health care and social services a lot more than they need lunar rovers.
MW: You mentioned many problems in India. Is there one or two that you think could be a silver bullet that would help solve other problems? What do you see as the biggest problem in India?
FP: No question, the silver bullet – as it has been in South Korea and other recently developed countries – is a combination of good education and hard work. The work ethic is already in place, but right now too many people are using it to diligently scour garbage dumps for salvageable trash, because they have no education and no better alternatives. To my mind, educating landfill-scourers’ children and keeping them healthy enough to surpass their parents’ income levels is far more important than investing in space programs intended to bolster the prestige of India and its technocrat classes.
MW: Some of my sources seem to think the space program will help build educational opportunities in India, but I was struck by the high illiteracy rate, etc. Do you think space exploration educational programs are a leap that young Indians could make?
FP: It makes sense that the space program would create educational opportunities for budding young researchers. But if you’re a budding young researcher in Bangalore, there’s an excellent chance that your father was too. If, on the other hand, your father cut lawns with a machete in tourist areas, or drove a bicycle rickshaw through the dirt roads of Varanasi, the odds are that you’re not faring much better. The idea that investment in space exploration will usher in a new age of opportunity for a significant chunk of Indian children is a lot like the economic trickle-down effect that we still haven’t seen much of in the West – most of the benefits go to the top of the food chain, with some upward mobility for the middle and an occasional table scrap tossed toward the bottom of the pile.
If you want to effect change in India and bring upward mobility to the millions of destitute people there, you start by giving them what they need in order to live, then giving them what they need in order to learn. Affordable food, shelter and medicine meet those criteria – rockets don’t. While the small emerging middle class is encouraging, it’s a drop in the bucket among India’s 1,200,000,000 people, and the lower-class masses are long tired of walking past billboards hawking dishwashers and luxury cars that in their wildest dreams their grandchildren will never be able to afford. How do you think they feel when they hear about an 8-billion-rupee plan to put a robot on the moon?
Image via ISRO / Associated Content.
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