As ISRO chief, Nair was responsible for 27 successful missions but he had his fair share of controversies as well — the worst being the Antrix-Devas row.
Bengaluru: Given that he is the former chief of India’s globally celebrated space agency, G. Madhavan Nair’s induction into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was bound to make news.
The former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), who insisted in an interview that he was joining the BJP to provide technical assistance and would hold no political position, had a bittersweet career that ended on a sour note when he found himself accused of corruption and barred from government positions.
Pretty much a household name, Nair had a six-year run as ISRO chairman from 2003-2009, a period that saw the space agency launch some of its most landmark satellite missions: CartoSat, INSAT, OceanSat, and Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar orbiter mission.
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In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, but barred from holding government positions within two years in light of alleged irregularities in the high-profile deal between Antrix, ISRO’s commercial arm, and private company Devas for scarce spectrum.
Early work and career
Born on 31 October 1943 at Kulashekharam in Kanyakumari, Nair’s curiosity in rockets first took root when, in the final year of his undergraduate engineering studies at Trivandrum, he found a stray piece of rocket that had flown into the campus from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS).
Atomic energy and outer space were the popular fields of science then, and, in 1966, Nair enrolled himself in a training programme at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC).
A year later, after a chance meeting with the director of the space centre at Thiruvananthapuram, he joined TERLS, where he worked under A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who was then its director.
TERLS was set up seven years before ISRO, in 1962, just as the US and USSR were getting ready to fight out the space race. Both nations supported the inception of the Indian space programme, as did the UK, France, and Germany.
In fact, India entered into an agreement with the United Nations that opened TERLS up for use by all member countries. In return, the UN would fund it. It was established in collaboration with NASA (US), CNES (France), and the Hydro Meteorological Service of the erstwhile USSR.
TERLS is used even today as a station for sounding rockets, research rockets that don’t enter orbit but just perform tasks in the atmosphere.
Thumba, a small village in Kerala, sits very close to the Earth’s geographic equator, making launches easy and practical. Nair joined TERLS as the head of the Payload Integration Section, where his role was to ensure that all the scientific instruments of a rocket fit perfectly, had unfettered access to power, and would function when launched.
After five years of doing that, he became a project manager for telecommand systems, which communicated with a rocket, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center (VSSC) in 1972. Two years later, he went to work as an avionics engineer on the SLV-3, India’s first satellite launch vehicle that was then being developed under the leadership of Kalam.
The first of Nair’s professional setbacks came in 1979, when the maiden launch of SLV-3 failed.
In a 2009 interview, Nair remarked that Kalam helped him learn a valuable lesson at the time. “When SLV 3 failed in its first launch, Kalam taught us the biggest management lesson of all,” he said. “When successful, share the credit with your colleagues, but when faced with failure, own up yourself. The leader always owns up the failure.”
Less than a year later, ISRO launched SLV-3 for the second time, this time successfully. It was launched twice more, one of them a success and the other a failure. It was grounded in 1983 as work began on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which would fly almost a decade later and emerge as the Indian space programme’s reliable workhorse.
By 1988, Nair was heading the entire PSLV programme. Under his leadership, the PSLV rocket launched the Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system’s early satellites as well as the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) programme satellites, two series that have been hugely successful and useful for earth observation.
Chairman of ISRO
Nair then became the director of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), Trivandrum, and the VSSC, before assuming the role of ISRO chairman in 2003.
He has consistently stated that he had two goals as chairman: To engage society with ISRO and enable the public to appreciate the work they do; and to further and exceed Vikram Sarabhai’s vision of building indigenous satellites and mastering the capacity to launch them ourselves.
Responsible for 27 successful missions as chairman, Nair has played an active role in public outreach about ISRO’s activities. He has advocated for telemedicine and tele-education, with the aim that satellites can help fill the vast facility gap faced by rural India.
He also facilitated a number of international collaborations to raise India’s standing in space research.
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In 2007, however, a controversial land deal to establish the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), a government-aided college in Thiruvananthapuram, dedicated to the study of outer space, landed ISRO and Nair foul of the Kerala government. It was alleged that the land in question was ecologically fragile and acquired via “shady means”. The institute was finally set up at an alternative site given by the state government.
Devas controversy
However, it is the alleged Antrix-Devas scam that has been the biggest low of his career.
In 2005, Antrix signed an agreement with Devas Multimedia, a private company formed by former ISRO employees and venture capitalists from the US, to lease the latter scarce S band spectrum, reserved for strategic purposes, on two ISRO satellites (GSAT 6 and GSAT 6A) for Rs 1,400 crore.
Devas was to use the spectrum to provide digital multimedia services, and the Antrix agreement would have given the former “first-mover” advantage in the untapped satellite telephony sector, which offers services far more seamless than the terrestrial sector. In exchange, The Indian Express explained in a primer, Devas promised affordable access to all.
A month after K. Radhakrishnan assumed the post of chairman from Nair, he ordered a full probe into the Devas-Antrix deal. Several inconsistencies surfaced, and it turned out that there had been serious procedural lapses in the conduct of the deal done.
According to a report in The Hindu Business Line, which first exposed the alleged inconsistencies with sister paper The Hindu, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) noted in a report on the deak that “ISRO officials hid critical details of the agreement… downplayed the cost to ISRO. Instead, they connived to benefit a private company floated by their former cronies”.
International arbitrations have since ruled in favour of Devas, ordering Antrix to pay exorbitant fines to the tune of Rs 4,435 crore for the loss it incurred.
Nair, along with former scientific secretary A. Bhaskaranarayana, former Antrix managing director K.R. Sridhara Murthy and former senior scientist K.N. Shankara were barred from holding any governmental roles in the future.
In his defence, Nair has claimed in multiple interviews that the deal was in keeping with the procedures in place. He said the first inquiry committee set up by the Centre had given him a clean chit, adding that Radhakrishnan, a member of the second committee, deliberately threw him under the bus.