M A I N   N E W S

Blacklisting of ISRO ex-chief stuns scientists
Shubhadeep Choudhury & Suresh Dharur
Tribune News Service

Bangalore/Hyderabad, January 25
The UPA government today found itself at the centre of another blazing controversy with a stunned scientific community reacting with disbelief over its decision to damn and debar former ISRO chairman and space scientist G Madhavan Nair and three other scientists from re-employment in government institutions.

Nair and three others — ISRO former Scientific Secretary A Bhaskaranarayana, former Managing Director of Antrix (the organisation’s commercial arm) KR Sridharamurthy and former Director of Satellite Centre KN Shankara — have been damned for their alleged role in allocation of scarce S-band space spectrum to a private firm, Devas.

But Nair and Sridharamurthy today claimed that they had not been given any hearing at all. “Am I worse than a terrorist?” asked an angry Nair, who questioned the government’s failure to serve him with any show-cause notice. Sridharamurthy also told The Tribune that he had learnt from the media about a committee headed by former Chief Vigilance Commissioner Pratyush Sinha, looking into the deal. But although he himself had written to the committee, expressing a desire to appear before it, there was no response. The stunned founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and eminent scientist Dr PM Bhargava said in Hyderabad.

“ It is a very sad day for Indian Science”. He demanded that the report of the expert committee, constituted by the PMO in February last year, be placed in the public domain. “We must know the complete details of the deal and the way the investigation has been done before coming to conclusions,” he told The Tribune.

Antrix had signed a deal with Devas Multimedia, the Indian company floated by former ISRO officials on behalf of an American firm, in 2005. Antrix was to supply 70 MHz of S-Band spectrum to Devas at an allegedly throw-away price of Rs 1,000 crore. ISRO ordered a review in December, 2009 and recommended annullment of the deal in July, 2010. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India ( CAG) in its report indicated that the deal caused the nation an estimated loss of Rs two lakh crore.

But asked to respond to the CAG’s estimate, Sridharamurthy today snapped, “It’s utter nonsense”. He claimed that the inquiry committee and the CAG had failed to distinguish between ‘space spectrum’ and ‘terrestrial spectrum’. ISRO, he pointed out, had no authority to issue any licence and had merely leased transponders. The license could be issued to Devas only by the ministry and without a licence, the company could not possibly provide multimedia services to consumers.

Madhavan Nair, a distinguished scientist and a Padma Vibhushan awardee, said he was keeping the option of moving the court open. An angry Nair (68) blamed his successor K. Radhakrishnan for allegedly misleading the government and the inquiry committee. Accusing his successor of pursuing a ‘personal agenda’, Nair told the media, “That individual is bent upon hitting so many people and in that process, he is killing the organisation”.

“These four former officers shall be divested of any current assignment/consultancy with the government with immediate effect,” read the order passed on January 13.