Dark side of the moon mission

The rover of Chandrayaan-3, Pragyan, rolls out onto the lunar surface, as observed by lander imager camera, on August 23. Pic/PTI

At 6.04 pm, August 23, all of us were so many little moons, shining with light, and delight, in the reflected glory of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) landing India on the moon. This is an astonishing feat for a country where 26 per cent of the population is illiterate and just 8-9 per cent graduates, and where teeming millions live below or precariously float over the poverty level. India has always been a land of contradictions. India will now also be known as the land where ambitious space explorations are undertaken successfully.

ISRO's most dramatic accomplishment rebuts those who never tire of recommending the dismantling of the public sector. Conceived in the first decade of India's Independence, structured to function directly under the Prime Minister's Office, and funded by the State, ISRO has always blazed a trail throughout its history. Governance at ISRO requires to be studied for fathoming why it has blossomed so spectacularly amidst several public undertakings wilting, including one connected to it.

Call it the dark side of the moon mission, or a tragic story of a public sector entity gasping for breath even as its employees cut a cake on July 14, the day Chandrayaan-3 blasted into space. They had reasons to celebrate, for as employees of Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC) Ltd, located in Ranchi, Jharkhand, they had worked hard to build crucial components for the launch infrastructure ISRO uses.

The names of these components sound esoteric - Mobile Launching Pedestal, Folding-cum-Vertical Repositionable Platform, Horizontal Sliding Door, 10 T Hammer Head Tower Crane, and the wheel-bogie system. A Central government undertaking, HEC does not have an assembly production line, conceived as it was for producing customised machinery mostly for public sector entities. It is currently working on ISRO's order for yet another launch pad.

For all their hard work, HEC's roughly 3,000 employees have not received salaries for months. It began with the August 2020 salaries coming four months late, in January 2021. Since then, the backlog has mounted. The last payment the officers received was on April 2, 2023, and that accounted for the full salary of December 2021, and half the salary of January 2022 and November 2021. It was a little better for workmen, or those who work on the production floor. They received the April 2022 salary in full, and half of what was due to them for March and May 2022.

Payouts at HEC wax and wane without the predictability of the moon, in defiance of logic.

Whenever the salary comes, it is transferred to them with huge deductions - an inevitable consequence of most employees taking loans against their Contributory Provident Fund (CPF) to meet their daily expenses. Most also have multiple equated monthly instalments (EMIs) to pay for the credit availed years ago. Punendu Dutt Mishra, a manager, has to still retire the loans he took for his college education and the car he purchased. He claims his gross monthly salary of Rs 86,000 shrinks to Rs 20,000 or below after EMI payments and mandatory deductions. Irregular income has trapped HEC employees in debt.

Take Shashi Kumar, a deputy manager, whose mother required an urgent heart procedure. The estimated expenditure at a private hospital was far more than the medical insurance he had taken out in her name. Unpaid for months, Kumar turned to a government hospital, where crucial days were spent waiting for her turn to undergo the procedure, and she died even as anaesthesia was being administered.
The thought that he could not get her treated at a private hospital haunts Kumar, who pays an EMI of R18,000 for a plot of land he bought. Financial insecurity has had him postpone admitting his child to a nursery school for a year.

Subhash Chandra, a deputy manager, and his wife have mortgaged her wedding jewellery, or streedhan, for raising money. A Kumaresen, a deputy general manager, rues his decision to leave the private sector to join HEC as he agonises through sleepless nights over the money required to marry a daughter and fund the education of another.

Manoj Kumar Jha, a workman, sells momos after work, to tide over months without salary. No shame for the unemployed to sell pakoras, Amit Shah once said famously. Is the government shamed by Jha's survival strategy?

HEC employees have written to the President and the Prime Minister, to the Chief Justice of India, to… They wonder why they could not be paid from the payment received for products they built and supplied to HEC's customers. Or from the money the state government forked out for taking over 467 acres of HEC land for the Smart City project.

Not for me to analyse whether misgovernance, or financial bungling, or structural problems, or negligence dog HEC. For no knowledge can diminish the sadness of not a beam of moonlight falling on HEC, even as its employees take pride in having contributed to ISRO landing India on the moon, which the Prime Minister described as the "victory cry of a developed India, the new flight of new India in space."

Some land of contradictions, ours!

The writer is a senior journalist.
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