________ A to Z kerala .......... [kvk] [www.atozkerala.in , www.atozkerala.blogspot.com]
New Delhi, July 21 (IANS) India earned around Rs.230 crore last in fiscal through commercial launch satellite services, parliament was told on Thursday.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) through Antrix Corporation Ltd offers satellite launch capacity on a commercial basis, Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office, Jitendra Singh, who also holds charge of the departments of Atomic Energy and Space, told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
"During the last year (2015-16), Antrix earned a revenue of approximately Rs 230 crore through commercial launch services, which is about 0.6 per cent of the global launch services market," he said.
Citing published reports available in the public domain on the international satellite market, Singh said the average annual revenue over the last three years, is approximately $200 billion (Rs 13 lakh crore), which includes the launch services market (Rs 0.37 lakh crore), satellite manufacturing (Rs 1.07 lakh crore), ground equipment (Rs 3.85 lakh crore) and satellite services (Rs 8.17 lakh crore).
He said in order to meet the enhanced national requirements for launching satellites for earth observation, communication and navigation, ISRO is taking steps to increase the launch capacity.
Towards stepping up the launch capacity, ISRO is in the process of exploring the possibility of enhanced involvement of Indian industry.
Besides meeting the national demand, the industry can explore the opportunities for commercial launch services, he added.
--IANS
What kind of treatment IS activists and sympathizers need is a question worth pondering. Theirs seems to be a madness that has no method to it. If they are fighting for Islam, why should they be the very antithesis of everything that Islam is? The prophet had indeed fought battles. But historians note that the fatalities in all his battles together were less than a thousand. His magnanimity in the aftermath of battles was so exemplary that many of his prisoners of war chose to return to his fold even after they were released. He entered Mecca, the city that had thirsted for his blood and hounded him out, a decade after being forced out of there, as a conqueror without letting an ounce of blood to be spilt. And to boot, he forbade his men even from claiming the encroached houses and properties they had been forced to leave behind in the city of their birth.
When his followers extended the domain of Islam after his death, they did not exactly follow his model of tolerance, but as the famous French Christian historian Amin Malouf pointed out, largely abstained from gratuitous violence. The example of the great Saladin (Salahuddin Ayyoubi) has been legendary. When his enemy commander King Richard lost his horse during the combat, Saladin immediately sent him a horse saying that a king like him should not be fighting on foot. When the English king fell ill, he sent his personal physician to treat him. In the aftermath of the Jerusalem victory, he was so magnanimous that he made it a point to make the city a true cosmopolitan centre by allowing Christians, Jews and Muslim to settle there on equitable terms. In gratitude many Christians chose to call their newborn sons Saladin.
More than on their individual victims, IS is now inflicting an irreparable damage on this tradition. It is in this context that the disappearance of a few Keralite families allegedly to join IS becomes a worrying development. As yet there has been no confirmation of these reports and there are speculations that their port of call is actually Yemen and not Syria. If the latter is true, it would mean less alarm and a little less concern for leaders of Muslim community.
The rulers too have an added responsibility. More than at any point of time, Indian Muslims are now feeling besieged and beleaguered. Questions are being raised from quarters close to the ruling hierarchy about their belongingness and right to exist. As Bobby S Said put it in a similar but different context their very ontology is being challenged by a hauntology. The talk of a Muslim-free India by the likes of Sadhvi Prachi is a grim instance of this. Increasingly, minorities feel like being deprived of not only democratic spaces of protest and articulation but even air pockets to breathe. The government stance on Aligarh and the witch hunt against Zakir Naik are stark reminders of this.