Atomic plant to come up near Delhi, says Jitendra Singh

Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Tuesday said that India will soon have an atomic plant that will come up near to national capital Delhi.

Addressing a press conference here, Singh, the Minister of State in the Department of Atomic Energy said: "We are going to have an atomic plant very close to Delhi just about 150 kilometres at a place called Gorakhpur in Haryana. It will be the first of its kind in north India."

"One of the greatest achievements of the Narendra Modi government is that we have moved out both atomic energy and space from the limited zones. Atomic energy was mostly confined to Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh," he added.

Singh continued, "Space was mostly confined to Kerala, Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. By legacy, these two departments do not have headquarters in national capital Delhi. We have moved it out. We should start from the northeast and north."

The union minister said that one centre of space technology and research has been set up each in Agartala and Jammu respectively.

Singh also said that the work of Chandrayaan 3 is "most likely" to start in 2020 and added that the next moon mission will be economical.

"The next Chandrayaan mission is going to be economical from that point of view. Most likely in 2020. The rover and lander are already there. We will be cutting on the costs," he said when asked whether the work of Chandrayaan 3 has started.

Talking about the Chandrayaan 2 mission, the minister said, "We should not describe it as a kind of setback because in the entire world of space history, there has not been a single country which could achieve a soft landing in less than two attempts on the moon."

"In fact, the United States achieved did it in the seventh attempt. Though, we could not wait till then. We have learned from the experiences of other countries. India's space journey started late," Singh added.

In September this year, the Chandrayaan 2's Vikram lander had lost communication with ISRO before it was to make a soft landing near the South Pole of the Moon.