vagaries of the monsoon and climate. Space developments can offer forecasts concerning weather, water tables and pests. Various calculations concerning agricultural planning in India suggest that better rainfall predictions can help save 1 to 1.5 billion dollars a year in agricultural production. The encroaching desertification in the Sahel, which brought one of the worst disasters due to drought between 1968 and 1973, could have been controlled by examination of the data available through remote sensing. Landsat data have been useful in recent years in managing forests in Thailand, agricultural development in Upper Volta and crop surveys in Brazil. Simple calculations show that with an investment of 5 cents a farmer, the benefit in terms of long-range agricultural planning will be in the order of 40 cents in food production, not counting better health, a higher standard of living and other rewards. Education Most developing countries have 60-70% of their population illiterate, deprived of even the basic information necessary for their survival and development concerning health, family planning, agriculture, national development and scientific and technological breakthroughs. Educational TV programs can provide easy information in remote areas of these countries. A community TV set can serve as a means of education for as many as 100 people. The cost of the hardware is hardly twenty rupees a person. In India, a successful satellite TV education program was launched in 1975, and it proved the value of such education in improving the quality of life of the villagers in the exposed areas. It would be a mammoth task to bring education to the 560,000 villages in India, but the space education system can expedite the process at a minimum cost by eliminating the cost of an enormous number of classrooms and teachers. Communication For education, disaster warning or personal emergencies, most of the less industrialized countries suffer from a lack of communications facilities. Whereas there is one telephone for every 2 people in the U.S., there is only one telephone for every 50 people in developing countries, most of the telephones being in urban areas. How can these countries expect national integration and national development without the basic means of communication available to the people, especially in remote areas? The knowledge explosion apart, most of the villages in the world can be inter-connected by telephone or any other communication system through space technology within 10 years at the reasonable cost of hardly one rupee a person, fhe economic, political and social impact of this development will be so profound that it is difficult to measure the costs and benefits in financial terms. This is an age of communication and in very few areas are there as many major breakthroughs as in the technology of communication. Yet most of the developing countries have hardly begun to exploit the potential of communication through space.
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