The maiden budget of NDA-2 sets aside ₹12,473.26 crore for space — about 15.6% higher than what was allocated for the 2018-19 fiscal year.
This is the highest outlay ever for the Department of Space (DoS). It surpasses the previous high of ₹10,783 crore proposed last year.
Last year’s estimates were revised to ₹11,200 crore. Compared to it too, the latest amount is an increase of 11.3%.
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(The present estimate is also well above the ₹10,252 crore that the interim budget of Piyush Goyal apportioned to DoS in February.)
The outlays for individual projects or missions are not specified. The money is channelised under four broad heads:
Space technology — which covers all satellite and launcher-related activities, current and future, of the 10 centres of the Indian Space Research Organisation — gets around ₹8,407 crore: a chunky 67% of the total outlay. The newly formed Human Space Flight Centre — which spearheads the crewed Gaganyaan mission of 2022 — is part of this head.
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In the revised estimates for 2018-19, the share of space technology went up to ₹6,992 crore (from the allocated ₹6,576 crore); and later the interim budget had raised it to ₹7,483 crore.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman retains increased sub-outlays made in the interim Goyal proposals.
Accordingly, space applications get around ₹1,885 crore towards educational, disaster management, and other activities of the National Remote Sensing Centre and Space Applications Centre, among others.
The second area is for the INSAT and GSAT communication satellite systems: their share of ₹884 crore is, however, below the revised estimate of ₹1,330 crore for 2018-19.
This money will go into expenses for communication satellites, their launch vehicles and the cost of leasing transponders on foreign satellites.
(ISRO leases capacity on foreign communication satellites as it has been chronically short of satellite capacity needed by broadcasters and VSAT operators for Internet services. It expects to fill the gap in the next two or three years.)
This year, space science — covering planetary, small satellite sensor, and payload development — nets a higher amount of ₹285 crore than before. In this year of Chandrayaan-2, ISRO is due to launch a lunar lander and rover mission on July 15.
Old proposals that are due to fructify in a year or two find incremental support, but the money is not mentioned.
They are a second Mars Orbiter Mission, a Venus mission, a space docking experiment, small satellites, the Sun study mission Aditya-1, and an X-ray polarimeter satellite called XpoSat.