Sunday, November 10, 2013

What India's space scientists and street children have in common...

When you see young children darting between lumbering locomotives to snatch up an empty water bottle or raking through the great mountains of reeking refuse for the plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes they gather together to sell for fractions of a penny, it does appear unarguable that social welfare should be put before any attempt to reach for the stars.

But I was to discover that neither the plight of Delhi's street children nor the apparent extravagance of India's otherworldly ambitions were quite what they seemed.

The team of Indian scientists designing the delicate instruments made to sniff and probe the Red Planet is based in the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat.

I had been expecting the kind of shimmering glass monolith you would associate with a Nasa lab or with the headquarters of one of India's world-beating IT companies.

But the cradle of the nation's space research harks back to another, older India. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. India launches spacecraft to Mars...
  2. India to launch Singapore's first satellite...
  3. Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India...
  4. The children that labour in the coal mines of India...
  5. A strange tourist attraction: Delhi's street kids...
  6. The Hole in the Wall, or how kids teach themselves...

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