EDITORIAL : THE HINDU, INDIA

Halt work at Jaitapur

With the death of one person and injuries to several in police firing against the background of violent protests against the proposed nuclear power complex at Jaitapur in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district, the controversy surrounding this project is all set to escalate. Some responsibility for this lies with the leading political opposition in the State, the Shiv Sena, which has spotted a political opportunity in the widespread unease among local communities in and around the proposed project area. However, the main reason for the rising tensions in Ratnagiri district is the peculiar intransigence of the State and central governments in this matter. Despite the Japanese nuclear emergency, they have dogmatically refused to put further execution of the project on hold; this is reflected in Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh's statement last week that the project was a fait accompli. Risk theory as well as elementary norms of democratic governance suggest that nuclear power projects cannot be thrust on unwilling communities, in business-as-usual fashion. Predictably, the continuation of construction work on the boundary of the project area set off the latest round of protests.

The Japanese nuclear emergency has hardly abated. That the promised review of Indian nuclear installations has already been partially completed without any role for independent scientific expertise or public interventions suggests little willingness on the part of the central government and the atomic energy establishment to reassure the public through a transparent and thorough exercise. Even the scale of the Fukushima calamity appears to have done little to modify the insensitivity the Manmohan Singh government has shown on nuclear matters. The passage of the Nuclear Liability Act to reassure potential foreign investors in India's post-deal nuclear industry appeared to take precedence over safeguarding the interests of the Indian people; it actually happened during a countrywide stocktaking of industrial and environmental safety on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas calamity. The current attitude to the Jaitapur protests only heightens the perception that assuaging genuine safety concerns in an open, democratic fashion matters little to a government that privileges the realisation of the nuclear deal above all else. There is no question of ruling out nuclear power tout court — but there is certainly a need for a larger debate, post-Fukushima, on its role vis-à-vis other sources of energy, including both fossil fuels and renewable sources. Forcing questionable projects on apprehensive communities after a traumatic international disaster is not the intelligent way to go.

PSLV notches up another success

Buffeted by two consecutive failures of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and the scandal that erupted over a deal to provide S-band spectrum to a private company, the Indian Space Research Organisation has been yearning for some good news to lift the morale of its scientists and engineers. It got that on Wednesday when the workhorse of India's launch vehicle programme, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), turned in another flawless performance. Well aware that it could ill-afford another launch failure, and that too of the PSLV with its impeccable record, the space agency had gone to great lengths to ensure a successful flight. The launch, originally scheduled for earlier this year, was postponed for checks on the Vikas liquid propellant engine. Lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on its 18th flight, the rocket precisely followed the planned trajectory and delivered three satellites into orbit 18 minutes later. The main payload, the earth-viewing Resourcesat-2, will provide data for a multitude of practical applications ranging from agricultural monitoring to studying snow cover and coastal zone mapping. India launched its first remote sensing satellite, the IRS-1A, aboard a Russian rocket in 1988. Many more followed, especially after the PSLV became available. India now has one of the largest constellations of remote sensing satellites in operation, supplying data to users at home and across the globe.

The PSLV was conceived as a rocket that would put 1,000-kg remote sensing satellites into orbit. After the failure of its first flight in 1993, the rocket was successfully flown a year later and has not looked back since. In the course of 17 successful launches, it has put 47 satellites into orbit, 21 of them Indian. Through a variety of weight-reducing measures and increased propellant loading, the rocket's performance has been steadily enhanced. In Wednesday's flight, the PSLV effortlessly carried three satellites that together weighed over 1,400 kg. The rocket has also proved capable of carrying out a range of missions. Apart from launching remote sensing satellites into polar orbit, it put the Kalpana meteorological satellite into a near-equatorial orbit and took the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft on the first leg of its journey to the Moon. Three more launches of the PSLV are scheduled this year. ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan has promised that a launch of the GSLV will follow. Indeed, a key challenge for the space agency will be to transform trouble-prone GSLV, equipped with an indigenous cryogenic stage, into as reliable a rocket as its predecessor.