 |  | | Madhavan, (above) Radhakrishnan |
New Delhi, Jan. 25: The Union government has punished four senior space scientists, including the former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, Madhavan Nair, without specifying any wrongdoing but alluding to their role in a controversial satellite deal scrapped last year. The department of space has said Nair and the three other former Isro officers should not be given any re-employment, roles in committees, or any other roles in government, in a note that it said was being issued under the orders of a "competent authority". The space agency had last year cancelled a deal to provide a US-based satellite applications company, Devas Multimedia, transponders on two Isro-built satellites. Senior Isro officials had claimed in February 2011 that the contract was cancelled after an internal review initiated in December 2009 and instructions from the Space Commission in July 2010 to annul the contract. The government had indicated last year that it required the scarce transponder capacity for national security applications, but had set up three independent panels to review the deal between Devas and Isro's commercial arm, Antrix, signed in 2005. The space department has not made public the findings of any of these reviews. But the note, announcing action against Nair, A. Bhaskarnarayana, former scientific secretary of Isro, K.R. Sridharmurthi, the former managing director of Antrix, and K.N. Shankara, former director of the Isro satellite centre, said the government had taken into account the reviews. The note circulated to all Union and state secretaries says the four officers should be divested of current assignments or consultancies. An angry Nair, who had overseen Isro's maiden lunar orbiter mission Chandrayaan-1, said the government had been misled. A PTI report said Nair blamed his successor K. Radhakrishnan for the action, accusing him of pursuing a "personal agenda". "This is his (Radhakrishnan's) personal agenda. That individual is bent upon hitting so many people that in that process, he is killing the organisation," Nair told PTI. An Isro spokesperson said tonight that Radhakrishnan would not be available to respond to Nair's accusations. Nair said this evening that the government had not even informed him about what it considers he had done wrong. "I'm really sad and disgusted at what's going on," Nair told The Telegraph. "I have maintained high principles throughout, and all the other three officers are also honest, straightforward. What needs to be investigated is what forces have misled the government." Nair said the first review panel had found nothing wrong with the Antrix-Devas deal. Another review panel had sent him several questions that, he said, he had answered but had heard nothing from the panel since then. "It is so sad — this is how we're treated now," said Shankara, a PhD in electronics and communications engineering who had spent 41 years in Isro. Shankara was a chair of a committee that had reviewed the Antrix-Devas deal. "There were other people in the committee — and if there was something wrong, no one ever pointed that out," Shankara told The Telegraph. Isro itself has declined to explain why senior Antrix and Isro officials continued to meet with Devas officials between July 2010 — when it claims the Space Commission ordered that the deal should be scrapped — and January 2011. Documents available with The Telegraph suggest that senior Devas officials met current chairman Radhakrishnan along with V.S. Hegde, Isro's scientific secretary, and others, on September 29, 2010, at a conference in Prague.Discussions between Antrix and Devas continued even through January 2011, after the failure of Isro's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle in December 2010. These discussions centred around the possibility of using alternative launch vehicles to ferry the two satellites into space. One meeting took place between senior Antrix officials and Devas on January 10, 2011, less than a month before the department of space announced the cancellation. "Isro has to explain why -- if indeed the Space Commission had asked the deal to be cancelled in July 2010 -- it continued to engage with Devas without giving them any inkling of the problem," a former Isro official said. Antrix and Devas now expect the case to be resolved through arbitration which, sources indicate, is expected to begin within a few months. Devas is likely to seek compensation for the time and resources it has invested, although the quantum of damages it is likely to claim is not known. Devas had engaged in extensive discussions with several government departments, including the railways, telecommunications, home affairs and earth sciences, who are likely to be potential users of the satellite services it was offering. | 
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