A rocket head being carried on the backseat of a bicycle. That’s how French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson’s camera captured the initial years of India’s space programme, which began in the early 1960s.
Many of the programme’s critics noted at the time that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was squandering the country’s severely limited budgetary resources on an elitist reverie far removed from the realities of the newly decolonised, poor nation. Four decades after Nehru’s death, his economic legacy, especially a dangerous flirtation with Soviet-style state planning, stands largely discredited.

Yet his scientific aspirations are coming to fruition in an India that is twice as open to the world as it was just a decade ago.  Last week, India put 10 satellites into orbit in a single mission, creating a new world record.
Among the payloads was Cartosat-2A. It’s an indigenously developed remote-sensing satellite that has already begun beaming high-resolution pictures of the Indian hinterland, setting the stage for what may be a revolution in the nation’s finance.

India has already made extensive use of domestically developed communication satellites. In the mid-1980s, satellites made it possible for India to export computer software written in Bangalore to the US. In the 1990s, the same technology enabled India to set up a modern, nationwide, electronic stock market circumventing the lack of a robust, terrestrial communication network.

Indian scientists have also effectively used images from outer space to map the missing nutrients in barren land so it can be reclaimed for agriculture. The next step is to combine satellite pictures of landholdings with field surveys and create a unified register of property titles.

Land titles are going to be a key use of the images obtained from Cartosat-2A. These will have a resolution that’s 36 times sharper than that of the images clicked by India’s first remote-sensing satellite in 1988.

“Land is probably the single most valuable physical asset in the country today,” a government-appointed committee on financial-sector development noted last month. “Unfortunately, the murky state of property rights to land makes it less effective as collateral than it could be,” said the panel headed by University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan.

Improving the collateral value of land will mean more bank credit to more entrepreneurs at cheaper rates. The first stumbling block to achieving this goal in India is the absence of reliable visual representations of what a landholder actually owns.

If the owners of small strips of land were assured that by handing possession of their holdings to someone else they weren’t diluting their ownership rights, they would gladly do so and come to cities to supplement their rental incomes. Urbanisation will accelerate; manufacturing industries will gain a competitive advantage from cheaper labour. None of this is happening now because of dodgy property rights.

“Land title in India is uncertain and there is no assurance of clean title,” Ascendas India Trust, a Singapore-based owner of office property in India, told potential investors last year.

All that may change. The government is planning a mammoth resurvey of all land — partly using satellite imagery — with the ultimate objective of creating a digital repository of all land records.

The spirit of private enterprise that was stymied during Nehru’s rule — and crushed under his daughter Indira Gandhi’s reign — is already witnessing a surge. And it’s getting a boost from Nehru’s insistence on inculcating a scientific temper among his countrymen. Even when the last of the state-owned companies in India is sold off, this aspect of Nehru’s legacy will endure.

Bloomberg