Buy, not build, spacecraft

Isro needs to turn itself into a planning, contracting, and contract-monitoring organisation - like Nasa has done

The immediate motivation for creating the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has subsided: The fruits of their labour can be purchased on the world market. Landing a craft on the moon has zero practical payoff. The gains from doing this now lie entirely in its impact on capacity building in India. To the extent that Isro operates in isolation, the gains for society are small. In order to obtain strong spillovers from public expenditures for society at large, Isro needs to become like Nasa, a contracting organisation.

There was a time when we in India built Isro for the purpose of