India: Reaching For The Stars Click - Short Edition


India: Reaching For The Stars

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Get ready, your Indian experience starts now.

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As soon as you step off the plane, India hits you like a big,

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It is everything you've ever imagined it to be.

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The first thing you'll notice will be the traffic.

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For 70 years this country has been independent of British rule

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and the cities that have sprung up around

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the old colonial grandeur seem chaotic, but they do kinda work.

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And India has found a niche in the wider world.

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Half of its 1.2 billion people are aged 35 or under.

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Maybe that's why it's known for its IT know-how,

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And the bosses of some of the biggest tech companies

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in taking over the world of consumer technology.

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After all, how many Indian tech brands can you name?

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The truth is that although there is a middle class of consumers

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here willing to buy brands it's not actually that big or that rich.

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Not that many people here can really afford the latest of very

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We're here to see how India is preparing for its future

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and, let me tell you, it is reaching for the stars.

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In 2013, India became the fourth spacefaring nation to launch a probe

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into orbit around Mars and, unlike those who came before them,

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The Indian Space Research Organisation,

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Isro, has been gaining a reputation for doing tons of successful space

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Their Mars mission came in at just $74 million,

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that's less than it cost to make the film Gravity.

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And, in February this year, they made history again by launching

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a record 104 satellites on a single rocket.

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It could just be that India has created the perfect

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combination of big brains with big space experience,

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but a mentality for doing things on the cheap.

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Just the sort of place you might go if you wanted to,

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say, land a robot on the moon for the space equivalent

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How confident are you that this will work?

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Welcome to the earthbound HQ of Team Indus, one of the handful

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of start-ups competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE,

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that's $20 million for the first commercial company to land a rover

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The Team Indus space craft goes into two days of Earth orbit

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and then, boom, 4.5 days to the moon.

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12 days of spiralling down to the surface and,

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if all goes well, out comes the rover, travels half a kilometre,

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sends back HD video and wins the prize.

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Rahul Narayan is the co-founder of Team Indus and has been

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here since the start of the project, way back in 2010.

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And at that point you had no idea how you would acheive it?

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Yes, I googled and figured out what Wikipedia had

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to say about landing on the mood.

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You did an internet search on how to land on the moon?

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Did it have any useful information?

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It said there had been 85 attempts and I think every second attempt

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Six years later, there are about 100 people working very hard here and it

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certainly looks like they know their space stuff.

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Even the toilets are appropriately labelled.

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And they've built themselves all the things that

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a serious space company should have, like a mission control room,

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a model lander that makes smoke and a simulated lunar surface

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So what do you use to simulate moon dust?

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Just like national space agencies, testing every component

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and simulating every stage of the mission is a huge part

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We're making sure we do everything right.

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We're going to make it frugal, specific to the mission,

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but there's absolutely no corners that we're cutting.

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And, to look at it from a more philosophical way,

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We don't have a flight spare, so if one blows up we can go and fly

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the other, we have to get this right.

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Team Indus is one of five start-ups from around the world that have

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secured launch contracts for their rovers.

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While they can't say for sure, they think they'll launch before

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any other team and so perhaps be the first team to land and win!

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Well, that's except for the fact that to save costs they have had

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to sell some of their spare launch weight to a competitor rover.

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Japan's Team Hakuto will onboard too.

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You're both going to get to the moon at the same time.

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It's whoever touches down first and whoever has the fastest rover?

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It's going to be crazy! In a manner of speaking, yes.

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So it's a race, it will be a very interesting race,

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and once we touch down and both the rovers are deployed,

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let's see which one makes 500m first.

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All of that assumes of course that the rovers

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make it to the moon in the first place.

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Space exploration is a risky business and when it goes wrong it

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Six years, hundreds of thousands of hours of effort and millions

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spent and there's certainly a lot riding on getting things right.

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You mitigate the big pieces and then the you start mitigating the smaller

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risks and, at the end of the day, absolutely, one small wrong piece

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of code that made it through could kill the entire mission.

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There is a word here in India that I think describes Team Indus's

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I've come to the centre of Mumbai, to Dharavi -

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Here, in its tiny alleyways, jugaad is all around,

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as a desperately poor population reuses as much

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Built by workers who flocked to the city over

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hundreds of years, some of the houses here date back

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Up ahead, there is a pile of shredded denim which they use

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They burn it to fuel the kilns, just like they burn a lot of stuff

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You can really tell the air quality is very poor.

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You just have to take a few lung fulls and it

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starts to burn the back of your throat, it makes your eyes sting.

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The smoke is a necessary evil for the people of Dharavi.

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Like most of the developing world, pollution has been the price

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India is paying for a booming economy.

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The smog that gives Mumbai its spectacular sunsets has also

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made it the fifth most polluted mega city in the world.

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And when the sun disappears before it hits the horizon,

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In November, 2016, the Indian government declared the air

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pollution in Delhi a national emergency, with harmful pollutants

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And it's not just caused by all of the traffic.

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I was surprised to find out a lot of it comes from diesel generators.

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See, the electricity in India isn't very reliable,

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but plenty of businesses need guaranteed power,

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so they have there own individual generators that fire up whenever

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the electricity goes down and that means there are loads

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of exhaust pipes like this all over the city, which regularly belch out

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When you start looking for them, they're everywhere.

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Even the mobile masts have backup generators.

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Here in Bangalore, we've come across a small project to capture

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So what we have built is a device that attaches to the exhaust pipe

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of the chimneys and this can be attached to pretty much any exhaust

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pipe, irrespective of what is the age or type of engine

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you are running, and it captures practically whatever matter comes

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Once you capture matter that is substantially carbon,

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which is like the basis of practically everything that

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exists in the world, at present we recycle it into inks,

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which we believe is something used by practically everybody

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The headquarters of Graviky Labs is a mix of art studio and mad

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laboratory, the perfect combination, if you ask me!

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Their so-called air ink does have a few restrictions.

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It will only ever come in black and at the moment it's not good

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enough quality to be used in printers.

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Graviky is giving it to artists, who are finding their own

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Painting and screenprinting, for example, for use

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And while the ink may only have limited uses at present,

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Nikhil insists it is still better to put the carbon to good use rather

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There are a lot of technologies that have captured pollution in one way

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or the other, but if you don't recycle it you are actually leaving

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I'm afraid that's all we have time for in the shortcut of Click, the

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full-length version is for you on iPlayer right now and there's loads

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of extra photos from our trip to India at:

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Thanks for watching and we'll see you soon.

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