HYDERABAD(India),February2, 2012: The Indian space establishment is all set to witness an intensification of the internal war over the controversial Isro-Devas deal with the probe reports on the botched deal, meant to allocate the scarce S-band spectrum to the Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia Private Limited, expected to be made public soon.This development follows a terse one-paragraph statement issued by Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) stating that it was in the process of getting clearances for release of the reports of the two high-power committees that had examined the 2005 deal, which may well expose the chinks in the space department. The federal government, based on the reports of these two committees, had in February last year annulled the deal, besides recently initiating an unprecedented disciplinary action against former Isro chief G Madhavan Nair and three other scientists, barring them from holding any government posts. Breaking his silence over the raging controversy, Dr K Radhakrishnan, Isro Chairman and Secretary, Department of Space, said: “We are in the process of getting necessary clearances for releasing the reports of the two committees — the High Powered Review Committee set up on February 10, 2011 (with BK Chaturvedi and Prof Roddam Narasimha as Members) and the High Level Team set up on May 31, 2011 (chaired by Pratyush Sinha) to examine various aspects of the Antrix-Devas agreement.” The scientific community sees Isro’s latest announcement as a move to nail Nair and his close associates. Nair himself, however, has welcomed the decision and said that he had all along wanted the government to make the twin reports public. The high-powered committee comprising B K Chaturvedi and Roddam Narasimha reviewed the technical, commercial, procedural and financial aspects of the agreement, and submitted its report to the Prime Minister in March. Two months later, a five-member high-level team, headed by a former Central Vigilance Commissioner Pratyush Sinha, was constituted to identify the acts of omission and commission by government officials. Based on these reports, the disciplinary action was initiated against the scientists for their role in the deal between Antrix, Isro’s marketing arm, and Devas for allocation of S-band spectrum. The action evoked a sense of outrage among the scientific community. The founder-director of Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) Dr P M Bhargava and C N R Rao, scientific adviser to the PM and former NASSCOM chief Kiran Karnik came out openly in support of Nair. “No deal on that scale could have been executed without the knowledge of senior bureaucrats in the Department of Space. It is strange that no bureaucrat has been named and indicted,” Dr Bhargava said. He also wondered why Radhakrishnan, the present Isro Chairman, was on the probe committee when he himself was a party to the agreement as a member on the Antrix Board.
