Moon Landing and Beyond The Justified Elation On Sky Is Not The Limit : Need To Avoid The USSR History And Using It To Bring All Round Economic and Military Renaissance.
Rajiv Upadhyay
For once , like the Cricket world cup and Champions trophy victory of Kapil Dev in 1983, all Indians in India as well as abroad, are deeply thrilled by the great Indian success of Chandrayan 3 in moon landing . But just as winning Champion’s trophy changed Indian cricket for ever , this great space success has the potential and should be used as an inspiration for bringing even greater glories to our long repressed nation in other fields too.
Even Chandrayan 2 was a great success even if it just failed at the last moment . Failures are the inescapable stepping stones to success . Even Apollo mission had many failures including death of several astronauts
including our own Kalpna Chawla . The nation must learn to be 
patient and tolerate failures in our renewed quest for self reliance in new age technologies. ISRO could not have given a better gift to Indians globally and they as well as all other associated agencies need to be felicitated publicly and adequately . Government too deserves credit for trusting and backing our scientists to hilt which is so uncharacteristic of our gas bags Babus.
But much beyond the scientific achievement , our moon landing is going to become a defining and turning moment of resurgent India, seeking its long lost due place in the forefront in global community. It will change the global attitude towards us from one of condescending acknowledgement to a secret grudging admiration . Our handling of Corona crisis and rapidly developed but effective Corona vaccine too was a great success but WHO connived to suppress it while recognising the much inferior Chinese vaccine .Colonial minds will take a long time to adjust to the new reality .
But while we douse our selves in justified elation , we need to learn from the history of USSR . It was first to send man in
space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961 .Its rover also sent landed on moon in 1970. Yet its inability to convert its technical prowess to useful scientific , economic and industrial achievements lead to its ultimate decline and disintegration . One small mistake of Gorbachev and Yelstin, in trusting west too much, reduced it from a super power to a pauper till Putin partially reclaimed Russia again .What can be a greater tragedy than mighty USSR’s Luna 25 failing to land on moon . China had landed on the dark side of 
moon in 2019 and is much ahead of us in space also as in every other walk of life.
India is not only badly lagging behind research to west and China but also even South Korea , Vietnam etc. in economic competitiveness . It had to pull out of RCEP accord as it could not compete in ASEAN .Government PIL schemes will rightly promote the much needed self reliance by filling the huge gaps in new industrial technology. But it will also create a high cost economy as in Nehru era. It is feared that it can even cause reintroduction of Ambassador car era and the old license permit raj as has happened in mobiles where the competition has just been killed by the high auction price of bandwidth and manipulations by one industrial house. Without competition private sector turns lazy and exploitative.
So to avoid repetition of the USSR’s fate , we must work on promoting our economic growth and industrial and technological competitiveness without subsidy. Like moon landing we should let our great achievements speak rather than old style sermons or speeches.
We tend to celebrate too early and premature media hype leads to promotion of mediocrity. Nation is made to ignore and forget our mediocrity and risk averseness in almost every field . In contrast in USA only the pioneering great success like Elon Musk’s Space X succeeds in getting mass adulation. We need to raise the achievement bar for the media hype. Compare Amazon, Apple or Tesla with our greats to know the difference. It is true in all fields not merely industry although there may be bonafide reasons behind our mediocrity.
In communications , space , renewable energy, pharmaceuticals and Railways we can be in forefront globally. If the government can link research in universities to our industrial needs by big project linked part grants for research in universities and industrial laboratories, in a well thought out manner we can overcome the research deficit. The culture of creativity and risk taking is more difficult to bring in but will follow our success in big research if total freedom is given to enterp.
Moon landing is indeed a great success but its huge potential must not be wasted in just street or TV celebrations but used as the trigger to inspire nation for a bigger challenge of ushering India to forefront in the new age technologies both in research and their commercial exploitation .
We must catch up with West and China in per capita income on Purchasing Power Parity basis in the next twenty years.
