A picture of the moon’s surface taken by the Moon Impact Probe after separating from Chandrayaan-1, (above) project director Annadurai with the spacecraft before the launch. Pictures courtesy Reuters, Isro

New Delhi, Nov. 15: Mylswamy Annadurai had a choice — join a booming colour TV industry, or accept lower pay from a space agency still struggling with its earliest launch vehicles and satellites.

For the electronics engineer, who had never stepped out of his home district of Coimbatore till he had obtained an MTech from the PSG College of Engineering, it was an easy choice.

On Saturday, his “baby”, Chandrayaan-1, helped India complete its journey to the moon. “This is another step towards human presence in outer space,” said Annadurai, project director of Chandrayaan-1 at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) Satellite Centre, Bangalore.

His colleague, R. Venkata Ramanan, had disappointed his father when he didn’t even fill in application forms for an engineering degree and, instead, chose to do his BSc and MSc in mathematics at Madurai Kamaraj University.

On Saturday, Ramanan, who had helped compute the orbital paths, watched images of mountains on the moon relayed by Chandrayaan-1 to a space centre in Bangalore. “I’ve waited nearly 20 years for this,” said Ramanan, who began pencil-and-paper orbital calculations in 1989, some five years after joining the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.

Many key people behind the moon mission had defied social pressure, rejected conventional wisdom or pursued childhood dreams to become part of India’s space enterprise. They had joined Isro in the ’70s and early ’80s when its profile was much lower than now.

Yet, experts within and outside Isro say the culture in India’s elite engineering institutes, as well as social pressure and the arrival of competition, is keeping some of the country’s best engineers away from the space agency. Of Isro’s 6,000 scientists and engineers, top Isro officials estimate, less than 100 are from the IITs.

“But we’re not unhappy, we’ve got extremely talented people. We have a rigorous process of selecting candidates,” said Isro chairman G. Madhavan Nair. “Our attrition rate is less than 10 per cent.”

In engineering streams such as electronics or software, attrition rates are almost twice higher. “Isro provides technological challenges and a stimulating environment. We provide a broad canvas. Youngsters are expected to fill in the colours by themselves,” Nair said.

“I thank God I got an opportunity to work on orbit dynamics,” Ramanan said. “With my background, I could have been put in other areas of aerospace, but somehow I was assigned what I wanted to do since my university days.”

Annadurai recalled that on a Friday, only three months after joining Isro, he had pitched an idea to develop a satellite simulator — software that would allow engineers to study how satellites would behave in space without actually building them.

“I got the green signal on Monday,” Annadurai said. The episode, Isro officials say, underlines a work culture that encourages ideas without regard for hierarchy.

“There’s freedom to think independently… and there are no punishments for genuine failures,” said George Koshy, who had joined the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in 1972 with a BTech from a college in Kerala and an MTech in mechanical engineering from IIT Mumbai.

Koshy had grown up near the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, India’s first launch site outside Thiruvananthapuram, hearing the sound and watching the smoke trails of India’s earliest rocket launches in the 1960s.

IIT faculty say some of their postgraduate students even today continue to follow Koshy’s early career vector. “Students who join us for MTech invariably come from lesser-known engineering colleges,” said Gautam Bandopadhyay, professor of aerospace engineering at IIT Kharagpur.

Some of these students seek jobs in public-sector aerospace firms such as Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, the National Aerospace Laboratories or Isro, he said. But those who do their BTech at the IITs hardly ever continue in the institutes for a PG degree.

“Our own BTech students move from aerospace to IT or management-related jobs,” Bandopadhyay said.

Isro now has competition from foreign aerospace entities too. “New avenues have opened up,” said Abhijit Kushari, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at IIT Kanpur. “General Electric, Boeing and several European companies have been picking up our graduates.”

“Their recruitment process appears much simpler and faster, unlike Isro’s which involves tests and interviews and requires students to have specific levels of scores,” Kushari said.

“They pay much better too,” Bandopadhyay said.