11 November 2004	Thursday	27 Ramazan 1425

HYDERABAD: In an attempt to reassure, Dr P. Pawar, a senior physician at Hyderabad's sleek Apollo hospital, lowers his voice and begins to ask slowly about the pain felt by his teenage patient.

Staring back at him, Lakhsmi gives hesitant answers, looking bewildered. Once Dr Pawar finishes taking his patient's history, he asks a colleague for a second opinion.

Nothing unusual in this unless you consider that between doctors and patient lies 1,000km of the Indian subcontinent. Dr Pawar and Lakhsmi are talking to images on television screens, communicating via a satellite network that links rural patients with doctors in hospitals and hi-tech research centres. In doing so, the hospital is demonstrating that India has begun to realize a core aim of its space programme: using technology to benefit the poor.

"We serve a population of 50,000 spread over 50 square kilometres in 192 villages which has no access to specialist doctors," says Suresh Shankar, the administrator of the Aragonda centre in Tamil Nadu. "This therefore is for many people the first time they can access high-quality advice."

Whether scrutinizing live CT scans or ultrasound pictures, says Mr Shankar, "telemedicine" has saved patients an often arduous journey from remote rural areas. "With this technology we can tap into the doctors in Hyderabad and tap into their expertize in specialist fields such as cardiology, dermatology and neurology. They just are not found here. So far more than 1,000 people have had consultations. And only 10 per cent travel from here to our hospitals in Hyderabad or Chennai."

Making all this possible is the work of the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro), which provides the bandwidth on its satellites to send images and sound between hospitals on the Earth's surface.

Nearly 60 remote hospitals are now linked to 16 "super speciality" units in cities. Earlier this month, medical centres in Pakistan were connected with those in India as part of the peace process between the neighbouring countries.

Isro is a self-styled "space programme for the people", which stresses its civilian abilities and is reticent about its success, unusual in a country where the gap between reality and rhetoric is wide.

Little more than 40 years after Isro began life as a launchpad for small American-made rockets, India's national space programme has sprinted ahead of those in wealthier economies such as Israel and Malaysia. By not entering a space race with the world's superpowers, the organization has so far resisted the temptation of prestige projects, such as manned space stations, which become white elephants in orbit.

"We are a space programme created to benefit the common man. It is not just to develop high technology for its own sake," says G Madhavan Nair, the chairman, at Isro's headquarters in Bangalore.

Keen to stress the thrifty nature of his work, Nair spouts figures and cost benefit analyses so frequently that he often sounds more like an accountant than the aeronautical engineer he is. He points out that his annual budget runs at rupees 27.3bn rupees, a little under a 30th of Nasa's yearly spending. Despite this, India has 14 satellites in orbit with another four planned launches next year.

The country's six remote sensing satellites form one of the globe's most advanced "eyes in the skies". And, unlike space programmes in other developing countries, such as Brazil, low costs have not seen spectacular accidents. Isro has recorded half a dozen aborted take-offs from almost 40 launches.

Pictures from space have been used to find water, combat deforestation and calculate crop yields. They also made front page news recently when an artificial lake in Tibet threatened to flood part of north-west India. Data have been used to monitor pollution and fight forest fires in Europe and the United States. There are plans to join the European Union's Galileo project to produce a rival to America's global positioning satellites.

Isro has managed a degree of commercial success, with "earth observation" imaging grabbing a fifth of the world market and generating sales of some pounds Sterling three million a year.

"One of our most successful projects has been telling fisherman where the largest catches are," says Nair. "You can identify where the fish are by the colour of the ocean as seen from space. Once you relay the information, yields go up by 150 to 200 per cent."

Last month, the space agency managed another world first: launching a satellite dedicated to education, called Edusat. This "schools in the sky" project is aimed at transmitting classes and lectures around the country, and within seven years is projected to reach 37 million schoolchildren.

Isro's latest mission also saw India join an elite club of five other nations, which have proved they can place satellites in geostationary orbit. "This is how we want to demonstrate results, with each step getting a tangible result. It is not great leaps but steady progress," says Nair.

Perhaps the most ambitious launch will be the country's moon shot. Isro is planning to send a satellite, Chandrayaan I, to the moon by 2007. Question why a poor nation such as India should spend cash on such an ambitious trip and the answer is a short one.

"It's low cost. We can do it for less than $100m," Nair says. "For that we can scan the lunar terrain and get imagery of the moon's surface. We will gather vital data on the presence of minerals and gases."

If it realizes its ambitions, India would become only the fifth power after the US, Russia, Japan and Europe, with this month's Smart-1 mission, to send a spacecraft to the moon.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.