People who keep making the (nonsense) point of space vs. better roads keep harping on how the money will be better spent on infrastructure.
I looked up the Indian planning commission's budget for 2013-14 road development. Planning Commission provided an annual outlay of Rs.37,300.00 Crore for 2013-2014 for development in road sector[1]. That is more than 6 billion USD - just for improving roads, for a year.
The budget of the Mars Orbiter mission was around 75 million USD[2] i.e. less than 1.5% of [1].
Here is a straightforward reason that no one who claims to be some sort of economist (social or otherwise) can argue against:
India has 1.2 billion people and is not particularly endowed with wealth that it can dig out of the ground. So the only way to create wealth is to turn 'sand-into-silicon' aka make productivity gains using the only abundant resource it has - the human resource.
Now if this particular mission can inspire .0001% of additional population to aspire for non-manual labor employment (i.e. study STEM etc), the productivity gain from those people will pay for this mission many times over (I haven't cared to do the math here because I just want to illustrate what I thought is an obvious point which people somehow gloss over).
Population of India: 1.252 billion people.
0.0001% o that: 1252 people.
GDP of India: 1.877 trillion USD.
Per capita: 1499.
So if we just applied these figures to the above number of people, we get an increase in GDP of 1.876 million USD. Which is not much. I know you were making a point.
I think this is an unfair calculation because it's not taking into account the fact that those people will go into STEM-type jobs. So it might be a good idea to compare it to the IT industry of India that produces revenues of 100 billion USD using 2.8 million people. That's 35 USD per person.
Combining this figure and the one above yields a rough GDP increase of 45 million dollars. We're certainly getting there in terms of order of magnitude.
To put things into perspective, 0.0001% is 1 in a million!
As to ISRO: you've made me feel proud to be an Indian!
I'm "sort of" Indian... by way of marriage ;)
I get really excited when rockets go up, by generally spending too much time on telemetry [1]. I have been excited about this mission as well; admittedly, I can't help but feel a little emotional about it.
I think your sentiment will be echoed across India, in the sense that it brings science, technology and astro-dynamics even further to the forefront. It will kindle a fire in young people to look even more toward understanding and exploring these fields.
Regarding the mission, I thought it was interesting how Amul (a dairy company in India) used their "Amul Baby" in this little congratulatory ad [2]. The words are transliterated from Hindi. It basically translates to, "ISRO eat! This Mars thing is pretty cool!" इसरो खाओ! यह चीज़ बड़ी है मस्त मार्स! (Native speakers: please forgive me if I'm not quite right, and correct me if so.)
Along those lines, the kid in me wishes we could see rockets showing up on cereal boxes, with blazing exhaust plumes, launch telemetry and explanations of how events must be planned in order to reach their precise window of opportunity in space.
Kudos on finding that - it's very well done! To clarify what it means,
"ISE ROZ KHAO"
That's a pun on ISRO as well as the phrase "Ise Roz", which means "This daily". Khao means "To eat". Ultimately - it translates to "Eat this daily".
"Yeh cheez badi hai mast mars" is actually another reference to not just the term "cheese", which is of course its bread and butter business (no pun intended), but also the fact that those are the lyrics to a very suggestive, infamous and controversial song from the early 90s which compared to the attention 'Twerking'received a couple of years ago.
To add to what you said, the hindi word "cheeze" in the line you wrote means "thing" in hindi, and it rhymes exactly with "cheese" in English. Amul, being a dairy products company also make cheese, and this line doubles up to promoting their milk product :).
A project like this could eventually help feed the poor. With such an efficient project, other countries would invest in India's space technology, hence bringing in wealth in the long run (to feed poor, among other uses).
Slightly off topic, but it depresses me greatly that maintaining/building roads is STILL such an expensive endeavor. How are poor countries ever supposed to have passable public transit systems?
Money is an issue affecting the quality of roads here.. But there is also a huge overhead associated with corruption and general incompetence/negligence of government..
I looked up the Indian planning commission's budget for 2013-14 road development. Planning Commission provided an annual outlay of Rs.37,300.00 Crore for 2013-2014 for development in road sector[1]. That is more than 6 billion USD - just for improving roads, for a year.
The budget of the Mars Orbiter mission was around 75 million USD[2] i.e. less than 1.5% of [1].
[1]: http://www.performance.gov.in/sites/default/files/department...
[2]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2013/11/07/how-indias...