Atmanirbhar Bharat and the rise of India’s private space sector

Our story began in 2018. I was studying in Punjab, and Tanveer Ahmed, a friend from school, was studying in Bengaluru and working on a student satellite. We registered the company that year chiefly because a client needed a name to put on an invoice. A year later, a satellite carrying components we had supplied was struck by space debris. It taught us that the space around our planet was filling up faster than anyone could keep track of — and someone had to. In 2020, we moved to Bengaluru to pursue that idea full time. By June, we had earned a place in IISc’s incubation programme. That month, New Delhi made a decision that would shape everything we did: It opened the sector to private enterprise and created IN-SPACe to promote and authorise it.

In 2022, Digantara became one of the first two private companies authorised by IN-SPACe, and our first payload reached orbit. That year, Tanveer and I met the PM at the IN-SPACe inaugural. Later, on Mann Ki Baat, he told the nation he had given us a challenge: To evolve technology that could solve the problem of waste in space. It was a remarkable thing for a PM to say of a company barely two years old, and it gave our work a direction it has kept ever since. The Indian Space Policy, 2023 opened the entire value chain to private hands, and the Norms, Guidelines and Procedures of 2024 set out how a company like ours could operate sensors on the ground and in space. Once the government defined the rules, liberalised foreign investment and placed its own money behind the sector, investors followed.

In January 2025, we launched SCOT, India’s first homegrown space surveillance mission. The PM marked it publicly as an important contribution to space situational awareness. For us, it was the first full answer to the challenge he had set three years earlier. By then, our understanding of the problem had deepened. We had begun by offering operators what was, in effect, a map of space, showing where debris lay and where it was headed. Increasingly, the more pressing question was what an object in orbit was doing, and why. Digantara’s evolution from space situational awareness to space domain awareness unfolded alongside the government’s recognition of that need. The government is today our largest customer, and its support has allowed us to build sovereign capability that protects national assets in orbit without leaning on foreign data.

The credibility of India’s framework, and the government’s readiness to present its young companies on the world stage, carried us into partner nations across Southeast Asia, while global platforms introduced our work to European markets. Travelling as part of the PM’s delegations, we learned that doors open more readily when it is India itself making the introduction. In February 2025, as he prepared to visit Washington, we announced new operations in Colorado, a step that might otherwise have taken years. In August this year, when we showed the PM our second-generation optical payload, he smiled and asked, “Is this for me?” It was a light remark carrying a serious assurance, one he soon made explicit: The government would continue to stand with the industry, and India could offer the world a model in space that is both innovative and commercially viable.

As PM Modi marks 25 years in public service, much will be written about the institutions he has reformed and the infrastructure he has built. Ours is the generation that came of age in those years. What we inherited was a country in which, as the PM observed earlier this year, risk-taking had moved from the margins to the mainstream. India’s young founders have been believed in. Digantara intends to repay that faith in the only currency that matters: Capability placed in the service of the nation, built in India, and offered, as we were challenged to offer it, to the world.

The writers are the founders of Digantara