Subhechcha Ganguly 
The new FTP underpins India’s export optimism, which does not fully acknowledge the great potential that is now available to it. The March 31 FTP launch meeting outlined an ambition of $2 trillion in exports by 2030, building on the post-Covid-19 export rebound. This implies a compound annual dollar growth of almost 15% over the next seven years, at a time when global trade is slowing and the two largest economies in the world are inward-looking.
The recent Union Cabinet approval of the LIGO-India project marked a triumph for Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and his science team, who have displayed great imagination in reaffirming their confidence in this project in the face of numerous competing priorities. It also marked a great day for science globally and in India. They won’t be dissatisfied.First, some context. In the United States (US), Caltech and MIT launched the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project as an ambitious endeavour to directly detect gravitational waves, which Einstein first postulated in 1916 from his radically new theory of gravity.
The most powerful cosmic events were thought to produce the loudest waves that LIGO would be able to detect. In fact, the first detection came from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away in 2015, almost a century after their forecast. In 2017, the first discovery won the Physics Nobel Prize. Since that initial day, LIGO has evolved into a completely new set of eyes that observe the universe using gravitational waves rather than electromagnetic ones. This opens up more perspectives on the same space phenomena when paired with neutrinos and cosmic rays, ushering in the era of multi-messenger astronomy.
Two eyes are preferable than one, but more are even better.With the advent of LIGO-India, the entire sky can be observed, allowing for the precise location and timing of cosmic collisions. A new detector will be built in Hingoli, Maharashtra, as part of this collaboration with the US. Together with the North American locations, it will search the sky for noteworthy gravitational events involving neutron stars and black holes, and potentially even vibrations from the Big Bang.
