Private players should not replicate ISRO’s efforts: G Madhavan Nair writes

India is at an important transition point in its space programme.

The country is moving from a predominantly government-led space programme to an ecosystem in which private companies and startups can participate across the entire value chain. Indian Space Policy 2023 explicitly enables private entities to undertake activities including satellite realisation and operations, launch services, data acquisition and dissemination and ground infrastructure.

​The number of registered space startups has risen from one in 2014 to approximately 440 in 2026​, the government told the Rajya Sabha in August. The government also estimates India’s space economy at approximately US$9 billion in 2026, and predicts this will multiply to US$40–45 billion over the next decade. 

The question therefore is not whether India should encourage private participation in the space sector – the answer is obvious. But it is important to decide where Indian startups should concentrate their resources, so that they create sustainable businesses, and not mere technological demonstrations or duplication of what Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has already done.

India’s space programme has accumulated enormous technological knowledge, infrastructure and human expertise over several decades. The objective of the private sector should not be to recreate this capability independently. Instead, startups should concentrate their energies on innovation, specialised technologies and new business models; downstream applications and commercialisation and customer-facing services. This would leave ISRO to focus on technology leadership and advanced R&D; manufacturing scale, quality systems and capital.

Understandably, space hardware attracts the most attention because rockets and satellites are visible and technologically impressive. But the bigger economic value often lies downstream, when the data collected by the satellite is able to answer a customer’s question. The potential of satellite data is enormous, from estimating crop yield or drought monitoring to flood prediction, transmission line monitoring, forest fire monitoring and climate risk analysis. India is in fact likely to become one of the largest domestic markets for high-resolution earth observation, communications and space situational awareness. The government itself has identified this as one of the principal revenue-generating areas. From just selling raw imagery, startups could focus on applications using this data with the help of AI that can enable business decisions. Here, India’s software and AI capabilities can provide an advantage over countries that have strong satellite manufacturing but weaker downstream digital ecosystems.

Satellite communication offers another major opportunity for startups with potential markets in maritime connectivity, aircraft connectivity and others. Instead of duplicating very large international satellite constellations, companies should identify specific markets where India has a competitive advantage such as South Asia and African nations. 

Instead of looking to build and launch rockets – something ISRO has been successfully doing for years – startups should concentrate on subsystems for upstream activities. The parameter must not be how many Indian startups can build complete rockets. It would be better to focus on how many Indian companies can supply world-class components to rocket and satellite manufacturers anywhere in the world. This shift could also offer more business opportunities considering a launch vehicle may fly only a limited number of times a year while a subsystems manufacturer can potentially sell hundreds of systems to clients around the world. India could thus look at developing a space component industry, like its successful automotive-component ecosystem.

This is not to suggest that India does not need private launch capability. But instead of trying to promote dozens of companies independently developing similar small rockets, it would be far more valuable to have a few successful companies with high flight rates, genuine technological differentiation,identifiable customers and so on. 

What, then, would ISRO’s role be in such an ecosystem? 

Rather than have a situation where private companies compete with ISRO for the same limited market, ISRO must focus on areas such as fundamental R&D, deep-space technology, human spaceflight, planetary exploration and national missions, among others. The private sector could increasingly concentrate on manufacturing, commercial launches, components, subsystems, applications and exports, as mentioned earlier. ISRO also needs to become more aggressive about technology transfer. As of August 2026, NSIL had signed 118 technology-transfer agreements covering 83 technologies developed by ISRO/ department of space, according to data shared by the government. This needs to be expanded considerably and must lead to mass production for the domestic market and exports. That’s how public R&D will translate into national economic value. 

To zoom out and reiterate, for India’s nascent but growing private space sector, the measure of success must not be the number of startups it produces. It would be more useful if the government were to publish an annual Space Industry Performance Index based on parameters such as annual revenue, export revenue, number of operational satellites, technology transfer agreements, patents and intellectual property, etc. This would help draw a distinction between a genuine industrial ecosystem and a large number of companies surviving mainly on investment. If India has 440 startups in the space sector now, the goal for the next phase thus should not be 1,000 or 2,000 startups. We need to aim for 50–100 strong, globally competitive companies, supported by a much larger supplier ecosystem. The objective must be scale, sustainability and exports, not merely the number of registered companies.

India’s space sector, dominated by ISRO, has demonstrated time and again that it can develop sophisticated space technology under severe resource constraints. Now the challenge is to convert that technological capability into a large, globally competitive industrial ecosystem. In this, the private sector must not be encouraged simply to replicate what ISRO already does – it needs to build on what ISRO has already created.

That distinction can determine whether India’s space programme merely produces a larger number of private space companies or creates a genuinely world-class Indian space industry.

This article is as told to Indulekha Aravind.

(The author is a former chairman of ISRO. Views expressed are the author’s own.)

This piece was first published by The News Minute. Become a joint subscriber here.