Is Head of India’s Lunar Mission A More Valued Engineer Than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
ISRO’s Chandrayaan rocket. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
August 31, 2023
Last week, Indians celebrated the country’s Chandrayaan-3 unmanned spacecraft landing on the moon, and being the first to do so on the moon’s southern pole. “India is on the moon,” announced Sreedhara Somanath, head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), after the successful landing.
“India needs more heroes” like Somanath rather than executives like Satya Nadella, the Hyderabad-born Chief Executive of Microsoft, wrote Barkha Dutt in a column in today’s Washington Post.
In addition to a propulsion module, Chandrayaan-3 consists of a Lander module, weighing 1752 Kilograms, named Vikram, after Vikram Sarabhai who envisioned and, in 1962, set up the organization which became ISRO, and a Rover, weighing 26 kg, named Pragayan (wisdom). The spacecraft was built by ISRO, a Government of India department with its head office in Bangalore.
ISRO’s goal is to develop and apply space technology for various national needs: including communication systems; television broadcasting; meteorological services; resources monitoring and management; and satellite launch vehicles.
ISRO operates on a very small budget. In 2023, for instance, ISRO’s budget was about $1.6 billion while that of the U.S. National Aviation and Space Agency was $25.4 billion.
In 2020, ISRO estimated the Chandrayaan-3 mission would cost about $75 million, according to CNBC. Even accounting for extra expenses since then, the mission’s total cost is estimated to be far less than that spent by the United States or Russia on lunar missions. And, Dutt notes, the cost of the Indian lunar mission is only 30% more than Nadella’s annual income as CEO of Microsoft.
Somanath, 60-years-old, joined ISRO in 1985. Earlier he served as the Director of ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and as Director of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre.
He earned a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from TKM College of Engineering, Kollam, Kerala, India, and a Masters in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Like Somanath, most of the engineers at ISRO are from lesser-known colleges and not from the World- renowned Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), attended by many of the Indian engineers who migrate, especially to the U.S.
Nadella, 56-years-old, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, affiliated with Mangalore University, India; a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee; and, in 1998, an MBA from the University of Chicago.
He has been Microsoft CEO since 2014, having joined the company in 1992. Earlier he served as the head of its cloud infrastructure and services group. Under him, the cloud business outperformed the market and took share from Amazon, Google, Oracle, and other rivals.
Previously, Nadella led research and development for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Sun Microsystems.
Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Nadella’s early ambition was to be a professional cricketer. In March this year, Nadella, a cricket fan, was one of the lead investors in launching the Seattle Orcas, a Major League Cricket team in the U.S. He is also a part owner of the Seattle Sounders football club.
In 2022, Nadella earned a total salary of $55 million. In addition, he owns Microsoft stock with an estimated value of around $260 million and reportedly has a net worth of around $900 million.
“Somanath will never own a cricket team,” notes Dutt. Typically, engineers in India earn a third to a fifth of what engineers earn in the U.S. This comparison is of wages alone, excluding the value of stock options and grants awarded to employees by many U.S. companies.
Indian founders of medium and large companies in America have earned a total of more than $55 billion, according to a 2021 estimate by this publication. However, since 1965, after thousands of Indians began migrating to the U.S. each year, contributions of $5 million or more by Indians to philanthropies total less than $1 billion, according to an estimate by this publication; excluding roughly $2 billion donated by the late Amar Bose.
Indian American engineers got their first degrees in India, including from the IITs, for less than 5% of what they would have paid at U.S. universities. So, Indians expect Indian Americans to at least donate the cost of an American education, comparable to the one they received in India, to educational, health and other social philanthropies in India.
While the success of Nadella and other Indian engineers in the U.S. is widely covered by the media in India, they also face criticism for giving back little, if anything, to India. So, it is not surprising that Dutt says that it is not wealthy Indian Americans but scientists like Somanath, who chose not to emigrate, who should be a role model for Indians, having “achieved just as much, if not more, in challenging circumstances.”
FOR MORE UNIQUE STORIES ON INDIANS AND INDIA:
For access to stories each week email: gitimescontact@gmail.com
or follow via LINKEDIN or TWITTER or FACEBOOK
(c) All rights reserved. Copyright under United States Laws
