A call to reenergise the Indian space ecosystem

The recent PSLV setback shines a light on bottlenecks plaguing India’s space programme and its potential debilitating impact on strategic choices

The failure of the PSLV-C62 launch is more than about the failure of a rocket or of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). This is the fifth Isro failure in the last seven years, but it should draw attention to wider problems disrupting the evolution of the Indian space domain as a national space power and as a combat force multiplier in the era of multi-domain operations.

A deeper examination of the Indian space ecosystem reveals that India is gradually falling behind traditional space powers. (AFP)

Despite being the fourth-largest economy globally, a deeper examination of the Indian space ecosystem reveals that India is gradually falling behind traditional space powers, the US, China, Russia, EU and Japan, in all three areas of space — upstream, comprising satellite constellations, midstream, for fast paced space data aggregation, and downstream, that covers revenue generation. India’s focus on prestige programmes like Gaganyaan may have actually triggered a fall in the country holding the highest global small satellite launch share of 35% in 2017 to zero in 2024.

It was the US’ activation of Selective Availability of GPS signals during the Kargil War that pushed India to develop NavIC, its own satellite navigation constellation. Since then, however, India has fallen behind. Despite the successful launch of Isro’s GSLV-F15 rocket in January 2025, an anomaly encountered in India’s second generation NavIC satellite NVS-02 prevented it from being placed in the final orbit. Of the minimum seven NavIC satellites required, India today has only four fully functional ones and even out of these two are nearing the end of their life.

The three biggest bottlenecks for India in the commercial space domain are slowing launch frequency because of reliability concerns of launch rockets and limited launch facilities, delays in satellite production, and time running out for suitable orbital slots. While American and Chinese companies have made hundreds of thousands of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) filings to secure access to spectrum and orbital slots, India is late even in ITU filings.

Meanwhile, China’s reforms of its satellite launch architecture have facilitated its South Asian expansion. In 2025, China launched four satellites for Pakistan, and a Chinese company, Piesat, entered into a 20-satellites deal worth $406 million with Pakistan by cutting SUPARCO’s (Pakistan’s Isro equivalent) budget by 90%. Last year, China also launched a satellite for Nepal while a Nepalese satellite was lost in the Indian PSLV-C62 launch.

The strategic autonomy that Indian foreign policy keeps highlighting cannot be facilitated without data self-sufficiency or data sovereignty in the space domain. MapmyIndia’s Mappls navigation software is better suited for Indian conditions than Google Maps, but most Indians still use the latter giving away data and revenue to an American corporation. This is in sharp contrast to China which has its own Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Beidou, and does not allow Google in its territory. As India inks satellite communication deals with Elon Musk’s Starlink, it must not be forgotten that he selectively denied Starlink to Ukraine on many occasions when that country needed it the most.

Militarily, Operation Sindoor displayed India’s critical dependence on American and other foreign remote sensing satellite constellations even as the data available was selectively delayed. China, on the other hand, reliably provided 129 civilian commercial satellite images of Pahalgam to Pakistan from January 1 to April 27, 2025, allowing the latter to plan the Pahalgam terrorist attack on April 22. India’s first electronic intelligence (ELINT) experimental satellite has not led to formation-flying ELINT constellations due to the absence of a roadmap and funding. By contrast, it was China’s ELINT array of 170-plus satellites across 15 constellations that allowed the Pakistani Air Force to claim they could electronically identify every IAF aircraft during Operation Sindoor.

Compared to Russia, the US and China, which all have separate military space forces, India’s Defence Space Agency, raised only in 2019, remains a lower-ranked and inadequately empowered tri-service organisation, manned by non-specialists unlike in the other three other militaries. The three armed services and several agencies continue to work in compartmentalised data silos and are thus unable to stitch together a common operating picture, essential for military commanders to take correct and timely decisions. Even Pakistan has a space command under its Air Force — announced in 2021 and fully functional by 2024 and integrated with its cyber command.

The Chinese defence budget is three times that of India’s and so a 3:1 ratio or even a 10:1 ratio in the satellite launch domain in China’s favour — China’s space programme falls under its military unlike the case in India — could have been considered reasonable. However, the asymmetry is much wider with a Chinese array of 396 remote sensing satellites out of the over thousand satellites operational in 2024. Even India’s Space Based Surveillance-III plan for launching just 52 defence satellites by 2030 is likely to fall well short given its current launch frequency — only one defence satellite launched from 2023 to 2025. With Chinese launches for Pakistan, the latter is likely to soon have an important combat edge over India. Direct purchase of a foreign satellite with an Indian flag or launch of an Indian commercial satellite from foreign soil will make India slightly more self-reliant in the interim period than daily dependence on foreign satellites for procurement of satellite images to monitor the rapid developments in its neighbours.

India’s limited space assets are further threatened by qualitative and quantitative advancements in counter-space capabilities by China, and others. Chinese space-based manoeuvres near Indian satellites are not uncommon while their military’s ground-based assets in Xinjiang and Tibet have attempted jamming of Indian satellites during the Galwan standoff.

Atmanirbharta in the space domain is not a choice but a strategic essential for India. While Operation Sindoor has accelerated Indian induction of drones and other combat platforms, strategic clarity on space policies remains missing. Sindoor 2.0 is probably inevitable and so timebound accountability of stakeholders in the space ecosystem and certain critical decisions are absolutely essential.

Brigadier Anshuman Narang (retd) is the founder of Atma Nirbhar Soch that studies strategic issues impacting Indian national security. The views expressed are personal