Manmohan Singh sabotaged India’s Nuclear capability

[antimony]

The Spring Temple Buddha was $55mil. An extra 30 metres is going to cost $445 mil?

Maybe Sardar Patel's statue will have is name embroidered in thin golden lines on his kurta. I have heard (from Saville Row sources) they they sell for a pretty penny.

[Officer of Engineers]

It actually has a variety of uses, from tech demo to raising the profile of science and enginerring (though the col. doth not approve)

I'm not a believer in tech demos. Either the thing works or it doesn't.

[antimony]

I'm not a believer in tech demos. Either the thing works or it doesn't.

In our field we do tech demoes and POCs all the time. Sometimes that is what leads us to the bigger things

[Oracle]

$500 million for a statue? YOU'VE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME!

Nope, not shitting. L&T gets Rs 2,989-crore order to erect Sardar Patel’s Statue of Unity

The condition of Government run primary and high schools are pathetic. One reason why private schools have mushroomed all over the country. Educating kids (4 or 5 years - nursery) costs anything between $1K-$2K in private schools per year apart from other expenses, leaving aside the International schools. If we have to be the world's workforce in the next 10-15 years (Europe, China, Japan are ageing), the quality of education at the primary level needs a revolution. It's hard to find skilled resources nowadays, and quality is thus compromised since we have to make do with what we have. IMO, that is what we should have spent this amount on, and more if required.

Its going to be a very big statue.

The Spring Temple Buddha was $55mil. An extra 30 metres is going to cost $445 mil?

[Bigfella]

I would go to bat for the space program. It actually has a variety of uses, from tech demo to raising the profile of science and enginerring (though the col. doth not approve) but the statue, hereafter referred to as the BAS (big ass statue) is a waste of money and resources.

No one said vanity projects couldn't have positive benefits. All you say about the space program is probably true. My question is along the lines of the best deployment of resources to get the most benefit for the nation. I would have thought India's top 10 priorities for funding are infrastructure, healthcare & education (just repeat in varying orders). Like electricity network issues a great deal of that is low level & decidedly unsexy. Surely India's battle for the C21st is finding a way to get the most out of its human resources , especially the half billion or so at the bottom. Raising their productivity by a percentage point will swamp anything space research can do. China is 1-2 generations ahead where it counts. Research on Thorium reactors & space programs aren't going to close that gap, even if they have positive benefits.

Neither is the BAS. That is one of the more bizarre things I have ever seen. Truly.

[Officer of Engineers]

In our field we do tech demoes and POCs all the time. Sometimes that is what leads us to the bigger things

POC is an experiment to determine which is the best approach to any given situation. Tech demo is a dog-and-pony show.

[DarthSiddius]

No one said vanity projects couldn't have positive benefits. All you say about the space program is probably true. My question is along the lines of the best deployment of resources to get the most benefit for the nation. I would have thought India's top 10 priorities for funding are infrastructure, healthcare & education (just repeat in varying orders). Like electricity network issues a great deal of that is low level & decidedly unsexy. Surely India's battle for the C21st is finding a way to get the most out of its human resources , especially the half billion or so at the bottom. Raising their productivity by a percentage point will swamp anything space research can do. China is 1-2 generations ahead where it counts. Research on Thorium reactors & space programs aren't going to close that gap, even if they have positive benefits.

Neither is the BAS. That is one of the more bizarre things I have ever seen. Truly.

Infrastructure, healthcare and education are good. But it's not a zero sum game. Research on Thorium reactors and space programs isn't going to close that gap with China because it's not meant to do so. ISRO has pioneered satellite television in the country and also jump started the telecom boom, etc. So people have benefited from the space program directly or through various spin-offs off it. It helped save lives when the cyclone Phailin hit Orissa (last year?). Honestly, I do see your point but the space program is just a tiny portion of the n number of things that are being done. The reality is, solving socio-economical problems is not a linear process, a country can tackle multiple issues simultaneously.

Spending in education and infrastructure will yield demand for knowledge based (skilled workforce) employment, guess what contributes to that.

A list of applications from wikipedia:

Telecommunication
India uses its satellites communication network – one of the largest in the world – for applications such as land management, water resources management, natural disaster forecasting, radio networking, weather forecasting, meteorological imaging and computer communication. Business, administrative services, and schemes such as the National Informatics Centre (NICNET) are direct beneficiaries of applied satellite technology. Dinshaw Mistry, on the subject of practical applications of the Indian space programme, writes:

"The INSAT-2 satellites also provide telephone links to remote areas; data transmission for organisations such as the National Stock Exchange; mobile satellite service communications for private operators, railways, and road transport; and broadcast satellite services, used by India's state-owned television agency as well as commercial television channels. India's EDUSAT (Educational Satellite), launched aboard the GSLV in 2004, was intended for adult literacy and distance learning applications in rural areas. It augmented and would eventually replace such capabilities already provided by INSAT-3B."

Resource management
The IRS satellites have found applications with the Indian Natural Resource Management programme, with regional Remote Sensing Service Centres in five Indian cities, and with Remote Sensing Application Centres in twenty Indian states that use IRS images for economic development applications. These include environmental monitoring, analysing soil erosion and the impact of soil conservation measures, forestry management, determining land cover for wildlife sanctuaries, delineating groundwater potential zones, flood inundation mapping, drought monitoring, estimating crop acreage and deriving agricultural production estimates, fisheries monitoring, mining and geological applications such as surveying metal and mineral deposits, and urban planning.

Military
India's satellites and satellite launch vehicles have had military spin-offs. While India's 93–124-mile (150–250 km) range Prithvi missile is not derived from the Indian space programme, the intermediate range Agni missile is drawn from the Indian space programme's SLV-3. In its early years, when headed by Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan, ISRO opposed military applications for its dual-use projects such as the SLV-3. Eventually, however, the Defence Research and Development Organisation(DRDO)–based missile programme borrowed human resources and technology from ISRO. Missile scientist DrA.P.J. Abdul Kalam (elected president of India in 2002), who had headed the SLV-3 project at ISRO, moved to DRDO to direct India's missile programme. About a dozen scientists accompanied Kalam from ISRO to DRDO, where he designed the Agni missile using the SLV-3's solidfuel first stage and a liquid-fuel (Prithvi-missile-derived) second stage. The IRS and INSAT satellites were primarily intended and used for civilian-economic applications, but they also offered military spin-offs. In 1996 New Delhi's Ministry of Defence temporarily blocked the use of IRS-1C by India's environmental and agricultural ministries in order to monitor ballistic missiles near India's borders. In 1997 the Indian air force's "Airpower Doctrine" aspired to use space assets for surveillance and battle management.

Academic
Institutions like the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and the Indian Institutes of Technology use satellites for scholarly applications. Between 1975 and 1976, India conducted its largest sociological programme using space technology, reaching 2400 villages through video programming in local languages aimed at educational development via ATS-6 technology developed by NASA. This experiment—named Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)—conducted large scale video broadcasts resulting in significant improvement in rural education. Full Credit should go to ISRO for open education revolution in India . Education could reach far remote rural places with the help of above programmes.

Telemedicine
ISRO has applied its technology to "telemedicine", directly connecting patients in rural areas to medical professionals in urban locations via satellites. Since high-quality healthcare is not universally available in some of the remote areas of India, the patients in remote areas are diagnosed and analysed by doctors in urban centres in real time via video conferencing.

Biodiversity Information System
ISRO has also helped implement India's Biodiversity Information System, completed in October 2002. Nirupa Sen details the programme: "Based on intensive field sampling and mapping using satellite remote sensing and geospatial modelling tools, maps have been made of vegetation cover on a 1 : 250,000 scale. This has been put together in a web-enabled database which links gene-level information of plant species with spatial information in a BIOSPEC database of the ecological hot spot regions, namely northeastern India, Western Ghats, Western Himalayas and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This has been made possible with collaboration between the Department of Biotechnology and ISRO."

Cartography
The Indian IRS-P5 (CARTOSAT-1) was equipped with high-resolution panchromatic equipment to enable it for cartographic purposes. IRS-P5 (CARTOSAT-1) was followed by a more advanced model named IRS-P6 developed also for agricultural applications.

Notice, the Moon and Mars missions are missing from the above list because they do not tackle societal/development issues and only represent a tiny portion of the allocated budget.

The Indian space program has a commercial arm (satellite launches for domestic and foreign customers) with a turnover of about 13 Billion INR (~$210 million)