We have decided, it seems, to send another woman or man to the moon. There is a point in proving to the world that we can do it, but the moon as a challenge is getting a little jaded. Even if we wanted to prove something out there, we should have thought of the challenge President Kalam had projectised of a new kind of aircraft which would conserve time and energy. This would be ideal as a high science project, in collaboration, say, with the Americans in the science and technology pact we have with them. Meanwhile, a lot of the excitement is here on the earth, in our soils and in our rivers and below the ground.I got a lot of undeserved publicity when I went on a satyagraha as vice chancellor of JNU to prove to my young friend Chandra Shekhar, the student union’s president, that he must not obstruct the academic council of which he was a member. Incidentally, when he was killed in Siwan, I sat down and cried, for presidents of the JNU students’ union go on to become ministers and leaders and criminalisation took this young one away. But of all the significant things that happened to me at JNU, one of the most notable was a map of the ridge at JNU produced by ISRO, followed up with ground testing by the ground water boys and a water harvesting project, one of the best on the Ridge. A check dam was built and others designed. Water and energy saving had begun and my successors followed it up.The conquest of space can be a powerful instrument to detail and conserve soil and water resources. It should become the hand maiden of village bodies worried about the use of common resources, watershed groups and all the partnerships, farmer-producer groups and cooperatives are signing with companies. The idea when the Space Policy was being developed was to make space products available like the STD. In other words, they could be vended and retailed. But, alas, that was not to be. I am a trustee of one of India’s early rural autonomous medical universities, set up by India’s first cooperative, and information is an uphill battle. That is not because we don’t have the resources, but our systems act as a bottleneck.The farmer is always a source of information. That he can receive and use information strikes only a few. Most crop and season reports are at least three to five years old and anyway the land holder does not give accurate information since revenue authorities can use it against him. Land use statistics are bad and that is well known. At the national level they can be wrong by five to seven per cent and more at lower levels. The Indian birds in the sky go across this beautiful land very regularly and ISRO’s subsidiary Antrix is competitive. In fact our photometry for commercial purposes is second to none. But we don’t allow this great resource to become the hand maiden of the farmers’ quest for competitive strength.It is not only in land and water, but also in more detailed information on crops and yields that we can use this information. While FSAL is there as an experiment, I am told that we have still not covered the last mile and so the estimates of crop areas and yields are still not as quick and accurate as they can be. This involves inter-agency coordination. In a globalising world, even monetary and trade policy needs quick and accurate information. We are giving quarterly estimates of national income, but the information base is what it was and people blame the poor CSO for changing them rather than ask how we can improve the basis of the effort.Why must the agricultural market only give data? Why can’t the farmer be given the information on what his competitor is doing in other states and other countries? Information technology is interactive. Shall we use it in that way or will the internal digital divide continue the way it is? India is the only developing country with a chunk of the global digital traffic, but we must cover the last mile to the village.When the then prime minister had asked me to mediate the Cauvery waters issue, a farmer chief minister was astounded that I knew more about the sugarcane areas in his state than his officers. I told him that I knew his state and the ISRO had given me the latest maps.Whether it is recovering from disasters, or the urge for profit of the last man, the challenge on the ground is more exciting than on the moon.
