India

It’s been a busy day for India’s space agency. Underscoring the world’s largest democracy’s desire to become a serious player in the space business, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched seven satellites today, six of which belong to foreign nations.

India’s satellite, Oceansat-2, will enhance the ocean monitoring capabilities of the original Oceansat, which launched in 1999. Four of the other six satellites were German, while one was Turkish and one Swedish. Each of those carries a university-funded payload designed to conduct research on various new technologies.

India has officially given up on its lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, which launched in 2008 and stayed alive for ten months before mission controllers lost radio contact. But officials are already looking forward to sending a robotic explorer to the red planet.

The nation's state-run space agency announced today a mission to Mars between 2013 and 2015. Xinhua reports that the planning will become reality after India launches its Chandrayaan-2 lunar rover in 2011.

Everyone knows the headache of waiting on line at the DMV to get a new driver's license. Now imagine repeating that process 1.2 billion times. Thanks to a new ID program, that's exactly what the government of India will soon experience.

The Indian government has just announced a plan to furnish every member of the country's immense citizenry with state-of-the-art biometric identification cards. The cards will carry retina and fingerprint data and credit and criminal histories, and will be linked to a central online database.

Will US car buyers adopt a car the size of a laundromat dryer, that costs as much as a sofa? Ratan Tata, chairman of India's Tata Motors, hopes they will. Automotive News reports that Tata is floating plans to bring a version of the $2,500 Nano minicar to the US within three years.

Chairman Tata made such remarks this week at a Cornell University forum in New York City. Deliveries of the Nano to buyers in India, where only one in one thousand people own a car, are scheduled to begin in India next month.

Cycle-rickshaws in New Delhi are getting a green makeover. This month, the state-run Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research unveiled what they call a "soleckshaw" (short for solar electric rickshaw). The soleckshaw, which like traditional cycle-rickshaws can still be pedaled, is a motorized cycle-rickshaw that runs on a 36-volt solar battery for up to 9.3 miles per hour, and carries a load of up to approximately 440 lbs. The battery has enough juice to get the rickshaw going for 30 to 42 miles.

The Cleantech Forum, an annual conference bringing together green-focused companies and investors, has acquired a distinctly global appearance this year. Business leaders launched a new organization designed to boost green startups in India; and Singapore and Abu Dhabi courted investors, suggesting theyd be ideal locations for this "industry of the future" to grow.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, its a seriously hot business—green companies won nearly 50 percent of a total of $3.95 billion venture capital funding last year.

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis´s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper
in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples-water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis´s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001-contain microbes from outer space.

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there's only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.