ISRO tightens exit rules after over 100 quit key missions

Staff departures are not a new phenomenon at ISRO and are not driven solely by the pull of private space firms.

Hyderabad: The Department of Space (DoS) has tightened rules governing voluntary retirement and resignation of scientists attached to Gaganyaan and other flagship missions, after more than 100 personnel from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) quit in recent months, the Times of India reported citing sources.

A fresh internal memorandum, dated July 14, was issued after the space department took note of the scale of departures, even though it has not officially disclosed the numbers involved.

Key project staff among those who left

According to TOI, sources familiar with the matter estimated the exits at anywhere between 100 and 120, with more cases reportedly under evaluation. Of these, around 80 are said to have quit from the UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) alone and at least 20 from the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), ISRO’s largest facility.

The departures are said to include some in prominent roles, among them LVM-3 project director Victor Joseph from VSSC and the SpaDeX project director from URSC. It also includes Aditya Rallapalli, project manager (simulations) for Chandrayaan-3, who headed the team that generated close to 25 terabytes of test data used to validate the mission’s Moon-landing sequence.

ISRO chairman V Narayanan acknowledged the churn but said the space agency was equipped to handle it. “That’s part of every organisation,” he told TOI, adding that the new order was aimed at ensuring critical projects did not suddenly run into trouble and that responsibilities would be reassigned wherever needed.

New order overrides 2020 policy

Under the memorandum, resignation and voluntary retirement requests from Group A scientific and technical staff working on Gaganyaan and other key missions will no longer be cleared routinely at the centre level. Centre directors have instead been asked to hold off on approving such requests until the concerned projects are completed and to forward all cases to the DoS, along with their own recommendations, for a final call.

This effectively reverses a November 2020 order that had given ISRO centre directors and unit heads the power to approve such requests from Group A personnel up to the scientist/engineer-SG level. That authority now stands withdrawn for those attached to major ongoing missions.

Attrition has a history at ISRO

TOI noted that staff departures are not a new phenomenon at ISRO and are not driven solely by the pull of private space firms. It cited past instances of nearly half of ISRO’s new recruits quitting between 2004 and 2007 and around 700 employees resigning between 2012 and 2024, according to official figures.

ISRO’s annual report for 2025-26 shows recruitment is at an advanced stage for roughly 1,050 scientific, technical and administrative posts, while a cadre review last year regularised 466 project posts and created about 460 higher-grade positions, the report added.

The recent exits amount to a small fraction of ISRO’s overall workforce of over 14,600, but their concentration at strategically important centres — URSC had 1,339 employees and VSSC 4,577 at the end of the last fiscal year — appears to have prompted the department’s intervention.