India is strengthening orbital safety through advanced tracking and collision avoidance amid rising space debris (This image is generated by AI)
In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, the Minister of State for Science & Technology and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh, disclosed a set of figures that capture the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) executing 20 Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres in 2025 alone and nine more to date in 2026, to protect Indian satellites from an increasingly cluttered orbital environment. Of India’s 22 active satellites, 20 operate in Low Earth Orbit, the very band where the world space debris crisis is now concentrated and where nearly every spacefaring nation is scrambling to keep pace.
The Global surveillance networks now track more than 43,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres in Earth orbit, including roughly 9,300 active payloads and over 2,000 spent rocket stages, with the total mass of orbiting human-made objects exceeding 15,800 tonnes. Beyond what is trackable, the European Space Agency estimates a further 1.2 million untrackable fragments between 1 and 10 centimetres and over 140 million particles smaller than a centimetre, any one of which, travelling at roughly 10 kilometres a second, carries enough kinetic energy to disable or destroy an operational satellite. ESA’s own 2026 Space Environment Report found that collision risk in Low Earth Orbit has risen 20 per cent since 2024 alone, driven principally by the rapid expansion of mega-constellations. This is the environment, not a distant hypothetical, but a present and intensifying reality into which India’s own satellites must fly.
It is instructive to place Indian numbers alongside those of the world’s dominant satellite operator. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, by far the largest in orbit, reported performing more than 355,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres between June 2025 and May 2026 alone, nearly triple the figure from the year before and equivalent to each individual satellite dodging debris more than 40 times annually. Industry experts tracking the trend now warn the constellation could be executing over a million such manoeuvres a year by 2030.
Other emerging mega-constellations, including China’s Qianfan (Thousand Sails) project and Amazon’s Kuiper network, are adding further density to the same crowded bands, while historical events such as anti-satellite weapon tests have left long-lived fragment clouds still being tracked and dodged years later. This is the backdrop against which experts continue to warn of a Kessler cascade a scenario where collisions generate fragments faster than natural atmospheric drag can clear them, by rendering the entire orbital bands progressively more hazardous and, in the worst case, unusable for generations.
India’s own footprint has 20 CAMs across an entire year for its LEO fleet, reflecting both a smaller constellation size and a deliberately measured, calculated approach to orbital operations, even as the country’s space ambitions, from Gaganyaan to its expanding communication and earth-observation fleets, are set to grow substantially in the coming years. The comparison is not a boast; it is a reminder of the scale at which India must now build its debris-mitigation capacity to keep pace with its own coming expansion, in an orbital neighbourhood that others are crowding at a much faster rate.
India’s response has not been only reactive manoeuvring but the construction of a fuller institutional architecture. IN-SPACe, the country’s space sector regulator, has formulated a “Policy framework and guidelines addressing State’s Liability towards third-party damages arising due to Indian Space Objects,” currently under consideration, which will address liability and insurance questions that most spacefaring nations, including established players, are still working out on an ad hoc basis. This is a meaningful step: as private Indian space companies proliferate under the country’s liberalised space policy, clarity on who bears liability for orbital damage becomes as essential as the technology itself.
More ambitiously, India announced its intent for a Debris-Free Space Mission (DFSM) initiative in 2024, setting a goal of zero debris generation by all Indian space actors, both government and private alike in the foreseeable future. Few nations have set so explicit a target across their entire national space sector, government and commercial together, rather than confining commitments to state agencies alone.
Underpinning all of this is the question of sight, you cannot avoid what you cannot see. India currently operates the Multi-Object Tracking Radar (MOTR) at Sriharikota, capable of tracking large objects in Low Earth Orbit, and has already put it to operational use. More significantly, the upcoming optical telescope at Hanle in Ladakh, developed under the Network for Space Object Tracking and Analysis (NETRA) project, is nearing completion and will be capable of tracking objects as small as 30 centimetres at geostationary altitude, a substantial leap in indigenous space situational awareness that reduces India’s dependence on foreign tracking data for objects threatening its highest-value assets.
India has also positioned itself as an active participant rather than a passive observer in the international frameworks shaping space debris policy, including the Inter-Agency Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), the UN Working Group on Long-Term Sustainability, the Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness, the International Academy of Astronautics’ Space Traffic Management Working Group and the International Astronautical Federation’s space debris working group. Notably, ISRO has contributed substantially to the revised IADC space debris mitigation guidelines, offering inputs grounded in its own technical studies, meaning India is not merely adopting global norms but actively helping author them, a distinction that matters as the rules governing the orbital commons are still being written.
The same written reply also touched on the human dimension of India’s space ambitions, noting that biomedical and life-support systems are among the major technologies being developed for the first time for the Human Spaceflight Programme, currently in various phases of development and ground testing, to be validated across successive Gaganyaan missions. Once demonstrated, these life-support innovations are expected to find societal applications well beyond the space programme itself, a reminder that India’s orbital safety culture, from debris avoidance to astronaut life support, is being built as a single continuous system rather than disconnected silos.
What emerges from the parliamentary disclosure is a portrait of a spacefaring nation choosing deliberateness over recklessness at a moment when the world’s dominant orbital operators are adding hundreds of thousands of manoeuvres and millions of debris fragments to the shared commons every year. India’s 20 satellites and 29 manoeuvres may look modest beside Starlink’s hundreds of thousands, but the institutional scaffolding being built alongside them indigenous tracking radars and telescopes, a liability framework, a zero-debris mission goal, and genuine authorship of international guidelines suggests a nation preparing not just to survive the coming orbital congestion, but to help write the rules that determine whether humanity’s access to space remains sustainable at all. As India’s own satellite fleet expands in the years ahead, under Gaganyaan, NavIC, and a rapidly liberalising private space sector, the frameworks being assembled today quietly, through parliamentary answers rather than press conferences, will determine whether that growth adds to the crisis crowding Earth’s orbit, or offers the rest of the world a model for avoiding it.
