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India clears mission to Mars August 4, 2012

<<India's government has cleared plans to put an orbital probe around Mars next year to study the red planet's climate and geology, a report said Saturday. The mission would mark another step in India's ambitious space programme, which placed a probe on the moon three years ago and envisages its first manned mission in 2016. A cabinet meeting late Friday approved the mission as India aims to cement its reputation as a serious player in the space industry, the Press Trust of India quoted an unnamed official in the premier's office as saying. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is expected to launch the Mars Orbiter as early as November next year, the semi-official news agency said. The unmanned Mars mission, which will study the red planet's atmosphere, will be launched by an ISRO rocket. The cost of the mission, approved by the cabinet meeting headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is estimated to be 4.0-5.0 billion rupees ($70-90 million), according to an ISRO official. The reported approval of the Indian mission comes as the United States expects to land on Monday its most advanced robotic rover to hunt for clues about past life and water on Earth's nearest planetary neighbour. India will be the sixth country to launch a mission to Mars after the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and China. In September 2009, India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe discovered water on the moon, boosting the country's credibility among established space-faring nations. But the space programme suffered a setback in December 2010 when a satellite launch vehicle blew up and fell into the Bay of Bengal after veering from its intended flight path.

Plans for the Mars mission come as India's government has been under pressure to concentrate on other issues such as massive power shortages and improving the nation's creaking roads, ports and other infrastructure. Earlier in the week, monster blackouts on two consecutive days knocked out electrical power for vast swathes of the country. India, which kicked off its space programme in 1963 and has developed its own satellites and launch vehicles to reduce dependence on overseas agencies, plans to launch its maiden manned space flight later in the decade.>>

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Lack of power symbolizes India’s inequalities
By Rama Lakshmi and Simon Denyer, Washington Post, August 6, 2010

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KATAIYAN, India — <<Night falls quickly in this Indian village, and soon the darkness is absolute. By 7:30, men, women and children lie down on jute-stringed cots outside their houses. The only sounds come from frogs, crickets and the flapping of hand-fans. Across India’s northern plains, many people were unaware that a blackout affected half the country last week. So few homes have access to electricity here, and those that are connected receive power so intermittently, that the world’s largest power failure in history was a nonevent.

Up to a third of India’s population, close to 400 million people, are not connected to the national grid, leaving them cut off from the development, progress and opportunity that electricity represents. Many of them live here, in the crowded northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar on the plains of the Ganges River. Lack of electricity is the perhaps the most obvious symbol of the inequality that still cripples this country and of the governance failure that is holding back its ambitions to be an economic powerhouse.

Health-care clinics cannot operate effectively without power or refrigeration for medicines, and children cannot study in the dark. Lack of power helps explain India’s low standings on global human development rankings, as well as the smog that hangs over these northern plains — thought to be contributing to the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers — from the widespread use of firewood and dung for cooking.

None of the 400 homes in the village of Kataiyan have electricity, a source of shame for 35-year-old Gulabi Amarikan when she visits relatives in villages that have power. “I have three children, but will they do anything better in their lives?” she asks while preparing to cook lunch on a wood stove in her cramped, dingy kitchen. “They can’t watch TV to learn anything like other children do. They can’t read at home. We have to live in the dark and in ignorance.”

In a nearby house, 13-year-old Kamlesh Yadav struggles to read his schoolbooks in the light of a hurricane lamp. “My eyes hurt, and I get headaches,” he said. “The boys in class who come from villages with electricity fare better.” Yadav’s attempts to study often take second place to his main role: keeping an eye on the few shops in the area that occasionally get power. “If I spot the lights in the distance, I have to run with my father’s mobile phone to one of the shops,” he said. “I get his phone charged there for five rupees,” or about 10 cents.

Despite the obstacles, experts say India’s rural power problems are not insurmountable. China, Brazil and South Africa managed to raise their electrification rates to 99, 98 and 75 percent, respectively, by 2009, compared with India’s 65 percent. Prayas calculates that India would need to raise its total generation capacity by only 15 percent to provide “lifeline” power to those remaining households.

Neighboring Bangladesh provides a powerful template of how renewable energy sources such as solar power, biogas and micro-size hydroelectric projects could be harnessed to supply villages in India without having to connect them to the national grid. Incomes, as well as the number of hours children spend studying and years they remain in school, have risen significantly in Bangladesh as a result of the program’s success. Solar power companies are eagerly anticipating the prospect of a similar rural electrification revolution in India in the years ahead. But in India, out of more than $6 billion spent on rural electrification since 2005, less than $10 million has gone toward that kind of decentralized generation and distribution, says Khanna, describing it as “the really big missing piece in access to electricity.” In Kenwasia, 66-year-old Raja Ram says he is sick of watching children “play in the mud and waste their time” because they don’t have light to study by. “My life has been spent in darkness,” he said. “At least my grandchildren’s lives should have all the good things that electricity brings.”>>