Participation of private players in space to help sector: Kawa's Kris Nair

The Central government's announcement on creating a level playing field for the private sector in the space sector is an excellent step towards increasing the nation’s influence in the global space industry, said Kris Nair, CEO of space technology startup Kawa Space.

Companies like Kawa Space, that are focused on building critical infrastructure for space will benefit immensely by the announcements made by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday.

"Space is hard. The relaxed norms help companies like ours to collaborate across boundaries in creating the next generation space systems — from India, for the world," he said. Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma invested in Kawa Space in Pre-series A funding, earlier.

As India becomes more and more self-reliant in the dual use of space, young startups like Kawa Space now have an opportunity to collaborate with the nation, and build products and services to help the nation, especially in the advancement of science and space.

Most of the space startups in India are collaborating closely with the civilian space agency and other organisations within the government to help solve challenges.

Indian startups are also building capabilities in advanced launch vehicles, SAR constellations, software infrastructure and next generation ground stations. Furthermore, the industry is collectively engaged in building advanced solutions to aggregate available data from owned satellite constellations to make it useful for decision-making; and collaborating in technology to help infer intelligence from that data.

"While that is happening, all of us are coming together to help identify blind spots in the data and build capabilities and space assets to address it. These platforms, along with the right policy directives put forth in today’s announcement that concern remote sensing will truly make space accessible for all," he added.

As part of the fourth tranche of the Rs 20 trillion economic package, Sitharaman said private firms are being given access to the space sector.

"The Indian private sector will be a co-traveller in India’s space sector journey. We will provide a level-playing field for private companies in satellites, launches and space-based services,” Sitharaman said on Saturday.