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Unlocking the Cosmos: India’s Liberalised FDI Strategy for the Space Sector

Unlocking the Cosmos: India’s Liberalised FDI Strategy for the Space Sector

by | Feb 29, 2024 | Science


The recent approval by the Union Cabinet of India to allow up to 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in its space sector marks a pivotal shift towards liberalizing a domain that has long been under stringent regulatory control. This strategic decision is set to lower entry barriers for foreign players, fostering a more inclusive environment for international investments, technology transfers, and collaborative research in space technology.

Critical Amendments in FDI Policy

The updated FDI policy in the space sector permits 100 per cent foreign investment through the automatic route in various sub-sectors and activities. This is a significant leap from the previous stance, where FDI in satellite establishments and operations was permitted only with government approval. That policy has been reformed as per the terms of the Indian Space Policy 2023, which promotes a liberalised threshold across different facets of the space sector, including:

Manufacturing of Components and Systems: 100 per cent FDI is allowed via the automatic route for manufacturing components, systems, or sub-systems related to satellites, ground segments, and user segments.

Satellite Manufacturing and Operation:FDI up to 74 per cent is permitted under the automatic route, but anything exceeding this limit requires government approval.

Launch Vehicles and Spaceports: Up to 49 per cent FDI is allowed under the automatic route while requiring government approval beyond this threshold.

India’s Space Economy and Global Perspective

Globally, the space sector is witnessing increased privatisation and international collaboration. Countries like the US, through entities such as NASA, have long encouraged private investments in space exploration and satellite deployment. Similarly, the European Union and China have been making strides in liberalising their space sectors to foster innovation and reduce dependence on government funding. India’s policy change aligns with these global trends, positioning it as a competitive player on the international stage.

The amendments in the FDI policy are anticipated to catalyse the growth of India’s space economy, which, as of 2023, stands at an estimated value of $8.4 billion, which is approximately 2-3 per cent of the global space industry. With an ambitious target to reach $44 billion by 2033, the Indian space sector is on a trajectory to claim a significant stake in the global space economy. This expansion is supported by a notable increase in space start-ups from merely one in 2014 to 189 in 2023 and a surge in investments to $124.7 million in 2023.

Liberalizing FDI in the space sector is not just an economic move but a strategic one, positioning India on par with global privatisation trends and international collaboration in countries like the US, the European Union, and China.

Private Sector Participation and Regulatory Body: IN-SPACe

Establishing the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) as an autonomous nodal agency underscores India’s commitment to facilitating private sector engagement in space activities. IN-SPACe acts as a bridge between ISRO and the commercial sector, with a mandate to encourage, authorise, and supervise private sector space undertakings. To date, IN-SPACe has signed 45 Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with non-governmental entities, paving the way for an inclusive growth model in the space sector.

Market Outlook and Way Forward

The Indian Space Policy 2023 and the liberalized FDI policy have set the foundation for a dynamic and inclusive space sector. This framework aims to boost space capabilities, stimulate commercial presence, and leverage space technology for development. India is poised to enhance its technological prowess and economic footprint in the global space industry by encouraging greater private-sector involvement and facilitating international partnerships.

The strategic shift towards a more open FDI regime in the space sector heralds a new era of growth, innovation, and collaboration. With the right balance of regulatory oversight and market freedom, India’s space economy will soar, contributing significantly to the global space community and reinforcing its position as a leading space-faring nation.

India’s decision to liberalize FDI in the space sector is a forward-looking move that promises to unlock new growth avenues, drive technological advancement, and position India as a significant player in the global space economy. As the country gears up to welcome foreign investments, the focus on creating a supportive ecosystem will be paramount in achieving the full potential of this policy change. The journey ahead is both challenging and promising, with the potential to catalyze a new space exploration and innovation era in India.

Sidharrth Shankar is a partner at JSA, Advocates & Solicitors. The views expressed are personal.





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Outstanding old egg

Outstanding old egg

by | Feb 18, 2024 | Science


Only in the world of Wodehousian humour has one found a guy calling his lover an “outstanding old egg”, but the expression seems apt for a seriously astounding discovery recently. 

Believe it or not, archaeologists have unearthed an egg that is both old and outstanding. It was found among a host of other artefacts — a woven basket, pottery vessels, coins, leather shoes, an animal bone and more eggs — by people digging for a new housing estate in Aylesbury, England. Archaeologists determined the findings to be 1,700 years old. 

All but one of the eggs broke, “emitting an incredibly sulphurous smell”, says a blog of the Buckinghamshire Council. The sole unbroken egg was placed in a museum. 

Dana Goodburn-Brown, a heritage scientist, conservator and founder of DGB Conservation, did a micro CT scan of the egg. The finding was startling — the ancient egg, likely that of a chicken, was “still full of liquid and an air bubble”. 

Scientists are excited by this unique research opportunity. “We were all amazed to hear that the egg is even rarer than we had realised, and with its intact liquid centre is the only known example of its type in the world,” the blog says. 

The next step is to find out how the liquid stayed intact in the egg without leaching out and how we can emulate that kind of packaging skill.





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The healing power of data

The healing power of data

by | Feb 18, 2024 | Science


The emerging trend in healthcare is the use of data analytics, which can predict, for instance, disease outbreaks and, at an individual level, whether a person is likely to develop a certain illness, or a woman is likely to deliver a baby prematurely. 

In November 2023, the UK Biobank released the full genetic sequences of half a million people — a treasure trove that scientists could use to uncover links between DNA and diseases. 

By analysing these genomes alongside clinical data, researchers can identify genetic markers associated with diseases, predict patient outcomes, and tailor treatments based on individual genetic profiles. 

This approach holds immense potential in tackling complex conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and rare genetic disorders. 

What UK Biobank released was a large dataset, but it is truly tiny compared to the ocean of data lying out there. Billions of pieces of data, including images (X-rays and other scans), are awaiting the attention of researchers. 

Incidentally, researchers at AIIMS, Delhi, are collecting images of oral cancer and pre-cancer cases and labelling them; 5,000 labelled images in hand, they aim to do ten times as much. 

A hospital chain in the US is using data to analyse the pathology of kidney donors and recipients to determine the right match. 

Similarly, there are mountains of data on the side of the commercialisation of drugs. 

Data abounds for deciphering everything from patient behaviour management to how a drug sales representative can best approach a particular doctor. 

Analytics-ready data

But data exists in silos and doesn’t readily yield to analytics (picking up non-obvious trends). Someone needs to ‘integrate’ the data to make it ‘analytics-ready’. 

A US-headquartered start-up called Agilisium Consulting, founded by Chennai-origin Raj Babu, does the job of getting data analytics-ready. 

Agilisium, in a way, encapsulates two entwining trends in the data industry — the business opportunity in integrating and ‘cleaning’ data to make it suitable for analytics; and the drastic reduction in cost, thanks to cloud computing. 

Babu earlier worked for 20th Century Fox and Universal Music Group, where he had to rummage through data and suggest the best times to display or withdraw a movie, or place a DVD on a Walmart shelf. 

Having cut his teeth in the field, he combined the ‘agility’ of data with his favourite Matt Damon-starrer sci-fi Elysium to start up Agilisium Consulting a decade ago. Its services include data architecture consulting, data integration, and storage and analytics. 

In a way, Agilisium is like ChatGPT at an enterprise level. Over 70 per cent of its 850-odd staff is stationed in Chennai. 

In a conversation with Quantum, Babu gave the example of Amgen, a US-based biotech research company, which was overwhelmed by the amount of data sets it had and sought Agilisium’s help to handle it. 

Asked if managing so much data requires large computing power, Babu says the company hires compute power from the cloud. 

Agilisium is an ‘AWS or Amazon Web Services partner’, which means it provides AWS cloud services and solutions to customers. 

Amgen says its data processing time dropped from 48 to 12 hours and it was able to ingest several petabytes of new data sets without disrupting the system performance. 

“We grew from hundreds to thousands of users, while reducing the errors in our data metrics,” says Sheetal Pillai, Amgen’s senior manager in charge of commercial data sciences. These new approaches to data management and processing enabled Amgen to scale up quickly, reduce time-to-market, and unlock more computing power. 

Million-dollar pitch

Agilisium recently announced that it has set apart a million dollars for co-innovation. 

Its pitch: If you have a problem and the data that can be used to solve it, then it will invest $25,000 (in terms of professional time, buying cloud capacity, and so on) to provide a solution. Agilisium’s takeaway will be the learnings as well as a chunk of codes, which can be applied elsewhere.

None of this would be possible without the tremendous fall in the cost of hiring cloud services. Today, you can store 100 TB of data on Azure for $1,600 a year. Amazon S3 offers the same for $2,100. Earlier, when you had to buy your server, it cost millions. 

Babu says India can become the “data-driven digital R&D hub of the world”.





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AI that approximates the human brain 

AI that approximates the human brain 

by | Feb 18, 2024 | Science


With the growth in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) technology and its applications, and the supporting infrastructure — particularly for computing, storage, and energy needs — the search intensifies for new hardware technologies based on new materials, and the architecture needed for the transition.

Researchers at IIT-Madras have come up with ‘memristor-based devices’ for designing low-power, high-performance hardware for AI and internet of things (IoT). A memristor is an electrical component that can “remember” the amount of charge that has passed through it and alter its resistance accordingly. Moreover, memristors are capable of ‘non-volatile memory’, namely they can “remember” their resistance state even after the power is turned off. 

So how does a memristor-based device store data or perform logical functions? 

To understand this, let’s look at the memristor-based device’s structure. To create one, we put a layer of insulator or semiconductor between two metal electrodes. By sending electricity through these electrodes, you can alter the layer’s ability to conduct electricity. When you send electricity in one direction, it makes a pathway between the electrodes and there is flow of electricity. When sent in the opposite direction the pathway breaks, impeding the flow of electricity. We can think of these two outcomes as “on” and “off”, which we can use to store data or make decisions in a computer. 

Dr Abhishek Misra, faculty at IIT-M’s department of physics, says, “Memristor-based devices are at the forefront of the development of low-power, high-performance electronic hardware required to implement the emerging concepts of AI and internet of things (IoT). These AI- and IoT-based technologies can serve humanity in various ways such as providing better healthcare, security, and education, to name a few.” 

Unidimensional factor

Like many technologies popular today that were born in the 1950s and beyond, the memristor, too, has a long history. In 1971, Leon Chua theoretically proposed the memristor as the fourth fundamental circuit element (after resistors, capacitors, and inductors). In 2008, researchers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, led by R Stanley Williams, announced the practical realisation of the memristor using certain metal oxides, making it the first experimental demonstration of memristive behaviour. In the 2020s, the exploration of memristors continues to advance, with research focusing on scaling up memristor-based technologies for commercial applications. 

Researchers at the IoE Centre for 2D Materials Research and Innovation (C2DMRI) at IIT-Madras have developed an innovative memristor device architecture using one-dimensional core-shell heterostructures of molybdenum dioxide-molybdenum disulphide. 

It offers significant advantages including ultra-low power operation, volatile and non-volatile resistive switching, a smaller footprint, and speed. 

Renu Yadav, PhD scholar at IIT-M’s physics department, says “the developed memristors can be as intelligent as a human brain. These devices can store as well as process information — thereby providing smarter solutions to the traditional von Neumann architecture, where the processing and storage units are separated”.

These structures, grown via chemical vapour deposition (CVD), feature a distinctive coaxial electrical contact between the inner core (metal molybdenum dioxide) and the outer shells (atomically thin-layered molybdenum disulphide) with a unidimensional geometry, marking a substantial leap from memristor design involving two-dimensional layered materials.

The devices are categorised as non-volatile (displaying a strong conducting path even without power supply and hence needing a voltage to break it), and volatile (weak conducting path that breaks on its own).

Nano advantage

Conventionally, metal oxides such as titanium dioxide, aluminium oxide and hafnium oxide are used as the sandwiched layer. However, after the discovery of atomically thin, two-dimensional layered materials such as molybdenum disulphide and tungsten disulphide, these are being explored for use as a resistance switching layer. Such memristors based on layered materials have advantages such as ultimate vertical scaling, reduced operating power, and energy efficiency.

The IIT-M team has fabricated the memristors on nanowire to make it unidimensional. 

Nanowire consists of a core shell heterostructure, with the metal core molybdenum dioxide serving as one electrode and the layered semiconducting shells of molybdenum disulphide serving as the switching layer. 

Further, a silver electrode is deposited on the axial direction of the nanowire to complete the metal-semiconductor-metal memristive structure. Depending on the thickness of the molybdenum disulphide shell in nanowire, both volatile and non-volatile resistive switching are achieved.

The unidimensional core shell heterostructure has a 10-nm diameter metallic core wrapped by a few layers of molybdenum disulphide, leading to smaller memristors.

Misra says the memristor device architecture has the potential to serve as a basic building block for future integrated circuits.





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What’s keeping India awake at night?

What’s keeping India awake at night?

by | Feb 18, 2024 | Science


Alongside initiatives like ‘start-up India’ and ‘stand-up India’, the country appears to be in dire need of a ‘sleep-well India’ movement. All of its amritkaal dreams of prosperity may come to nought if its people are unable to be productive for lack of sound sleep. 

Recently, three researchers — Karuna Datta and Anna Bhutambare of the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune; and Hruda Mallick of SGT University, Gurugram, Haryana — embarked on a project titled ‘Systematic review of prevalence of sleep problems in India’. They scoured thousands of scientific papers from repositories such as PubMed, Google Scholar, PsycNet, and Epistemonikos, and distilled them down to 100 studies for their analysis. 

Their conclusion? “India has a health burden of sleep disorders.” 

In a (yet to be peer-reviewed) paper they said their “final analysis showed major sleep disorders like insomnia, obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), restless leg syndrome (RLS), in a sample of 67,844 individuals”.

The overall estimate for prevalence of insomnia was 25.7 per cent — one in four Indians is affected. The prevalence of OSA was 37.4 per cent, and RLS 10.6 per cent. “An increased prevalence was seen in patients of diabetes, heart disease patients and in an otherwise healthy population,” the paper says. 

The study divided the sample group into ‘patient’ and ‘healthy’ subgroups, and compared the incidence of sleep disorders. It was 32.3 per cent and 15.1 per cent, respectively, for insomnia; 48.1 per cent and 14.6 per cent for OSA; and 13.1 per cent and 6.6 per cent for RLS. 

Within the healthy group they found insomnia was prevalent in an “alarming” 34.7 per cent of college students. The consequences included ‘excessive daytime sleepiness’ in every fifth person surveyed.

Lifestyle modification

Pointing out that sleep plays a big role in the progression of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, the researchers call for a task force to delve deeper into the findings. They also suggest lifestyle modifications to reduce the disease burden before taking recourse to drugs for sleep disorders. 

Notably, two of the researchers, Datta and Mallick, were involved in an earlier study that looked at the effect of yoga nidra on reducing sleep disorders. In their paper, published in The National Medical Journal of India, they say they enrolled 41 persons with chronic insomnia for the study on non-pharmacological interventions. Twenty of them received a “conventional intervention of cognitive behavioural therapy” and the rest took up yoga nidra, which is described as a “systematic method of inducing complete physical, mental and emotional relaxation by turning inwards, away from outer experiences”.

Both worked, but they found that during the ‘non rapid eye moment’ phase of sleep, yoga nidra led to marked improvement in the ‘deeper’ and ‘deepest’ stages of ‘total sleep time’. Yoga nidra improved both ‘slow-wave sleep’ and ‘sleep onset latency’ (time taken to fall asleep).





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Back-to-back success of GSLV proves the rocket’s capabilities: ISRO Chairman 

Back-to-back success of GSLV proves the rocket’s capabilities: ISRO Chairman 

by | Feb 17, 2024 | Science


On August 12, 2021, when the GSLV-F10 rocket failed midway in its mission to put into orbit the Earth Observation Satellite (EOS-03), many industry experts and space analysts wrote off the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). Sadly, the failure happened on the birth anniversary of Dr Vikram Sarabhai, who is regarded as the father of the Indian Space Programme. 

In fact, after that failure, the rocket was even termed a “naughty boy” by a former ISRO official (as per media reports) as it had a 40 per cent failure rate. However, the GSLV has bounced back, with consecutive successes – first, with the successful launch of GSLV-F12 in May 2023 and with the launch of GSLV-F14-3DS mission on Saturday. 

S Somanath, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, after the successful launch of GSLV-F14/INSAT-3DS Mission on the rocket, told newspersons, “The GSLV has not had such a good name with regard to the performance. (But) That has been a thing of the past. The payload pairing, especially with a bigger diameter, had a chequered history. This has now been corrected.”

“We have had very good missions — the last one and the present one — after the one that failed in the cryogenic stage. Two successive missions have happened after the failure. With this confidence, we should go into the future without any worry about the configuration of the vehicle. However, every mission of a rocket has its own uncertainties and worries. But this has been overcome by our design and analysis of the system, including the cryogenic stage and payload pairing,” he said.

“In today’s mission both the rocket and satellite performed very well. All the performance-related issues of the previous generational satellites have been addressed, more capabilities have been added to the payload. We believe the satellite is going to be an important one for the nation — we want to secure our citizens against weather-related information and disaster-related information that are crucial for protecting life and property,” he added.

In the pipeline

The next mission of GSLV will be the NISAR-Nasa-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar-satellite mission. It is a very big satellite. The rocket’s capability has also been steadily increased with payload and volume.

Somanath said it was a perfect induction of the spacecraft into orbit. GSLV is targeting a geostationary orbit – 170 km perigee (nearest to Earth) and 36,000 km apogee (farthest) but desires to raise the apogee further because that would give the satellite a longer life. “Today, we have 38,000 plus km apogee accomplished with no other issues. So, it is a very perfect mission with a little over performance that has been given to the satellite which increases its life,” he said.

The satellite is the third in the series of INSAT for weather and disaster warning-related activities. The satellite has been fully funded and will be fully utilised by the Ministry of Earth Science and other users. Two payloads – an imager and a sounder – are required to measure atmospheric parameters. It also has data-related transponders that collect data across the country from ground-based observations related to weather and make it available for computation modelling. It also supports a distress alert-based receiver and transmitter that supports in terms of disaster. 

The INSAT series has been extremely useful — they can image the entire country every 15 minutes. This data goes to the computational and observational capability of the country, and the weather forecast is given based on this observation and analysis of this data. This is augmented by better instruments put in INSAT-3DS compared to the ones done earlier. 





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