Page 24 - Mann Ki Baat English

The year was 2012. I was at IIT
Kharagpur, in the last year of my Mechanical
Engineering degree. Typically, the preferred
option among my peers was to go abroad
or land a high-paying job in a multinational
corporation, even in a non-core field. But my
dream was to build rockets and spaceships
from India, and that made me join ISRO as
a scientist.
It was the turning point of my life. The
trajectory that began there took me to the
heart of India's rocket program, in the midst
of the development of India's largest rocket.
Inspired by the Startup India program, that
path later evolved into me becoming an
entrepreneur and starting a private rocket
company alongside my ISRO colleague
Pawan Kumar Bharath in 2018 — when there was no
Chandana
space policy in place —and developing
CEO and Co-founder and launching a private rocket to space in
Skyroot Aerospace
2022, building India's largest private rocket
factory, and soon leaping to orbit with India's
first private satellite launch vehicle.
I recall this journey to highlight the
FROM multiplier effect of opportunities presented
by the Startup India movement, and
the progressive policies enabled by the
VISION TO Government of India to support and
encourage entrepreneurship in the space-
tech sector.
This is proof that when visionary policies
REALITY enable entrepreneurial zeal, even the sky is
not the limit.
For a nation such as India, with 65 per
A Decade of India's cent of its population under 35 years, and
the fastest-growing GDP among the major
Startup Revolution economies, opportunities can be as high as
our imagination. And that's just what India
achieved in the last ten years since the
Hon'ble PM Shri Narendra Modi unveiled the
Startup India initiative.
Today, India has over 400 space-
tech startups. Some like ours are building

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