INTRODUCTION
India’s private space sector is authorised, supervised and occasionally even refused by a body that Parliament has never passed through. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has, since 2021, worked as the sole regulator for every private entity seeking to build a satellite, operate a launch vehicle, or provide space-based communication services in India.[1] Yet IN-SPACe owes its very formation to an executive policy of the cabinet, not an act of Parliament. As India’s private space economy moves toward the government’s target of an 8% share of the global space market by 2035,[2] this foundational gap deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
AN AGENCY WITHOUT A STATUTE
IN-SPACe establishment was announced in June 2020 by the Minister of State for Space, after the Union Cabinet’s approval and the body was formally constituted in October 2021 as an autonomous single-window nodal agency within the Department of Space.[3] No legislation had been passed for it. This is a striking departure from comparable regulatory architecture elsewhere, where telecom regulation rests on the TRAI Act 1997, securities regulation on the SEBI Act 1992, and competition regulation on the Competition Act 2002. Each of these authorities derives its power from a parliamentary statute that defines the limits of its jurisdiction. Researchers have observed that it ‘does not yet possess legal authority of its own’ and instead relies upon the borrowed powers of the Department of Space and the Indian Space Research Organisation (‘ISRO’) to function as a single-window agency.[4]
The impact in this matter is that every authorisation IN-SPACe grants or denies, and the commercial consequences for startups that have sunk capital into satellite or launch-vehicle development, rest on an uncertain jurisdictional foundation. An authority without statutory footing is, in administrative law terms, exercising power that has not been clearly delegated by the sovereign legislative authority; its actions are consequently more vulnerable to challenge on grounds of jurisdictional overreach than those of a body created by Act of Parliament.
THE BIAS PROBLEM: THE JUDGE IN ITS OWN CASE
There lies a critical defect in the IN-SPACe appellate structure. Where a private entity is denied authorisation, its only option is to re-appeal in IN-SPACe itself. An independent analyst has characterised this structure as an authority of ‘the judge in its own case’.[5] The concern becomes more excruciating when the composition of the leadership of IN-SPACe is examined. The parent, the Department of Space, is headed by the Secretary (Space), who is concurrently the Chairman of ISRO, which is the very entity with which private players often compete for launch capacity, infrastructure access, and government contracts.[6]
This is precisely the organisational frailty that the Supreme Court addressed in A.K. Kraipak v Union of India.[7] In the case, a selection board tasked with recommending officers for the Indian Forest Service included a member who was himself a candidate for selection; even though he recused himself from deliberations concerning his own name, he participated in evaluating the other candidates. The court held that in the course of natural justice, especially the rule against bias explained in the maxim nemo judex in causa sua, extends beyond judicial and quasi-judicial functions into administrative decision-making wherever such decisions affect rights and legitimate expectations.[8] The Court further held that even a reasonable apprehension of bias, and not merely proven partiality, is sufficient to vitiate an administrative process.
Applying the same principle of this case to IN-SPACe is not a stretch. A body that reviews appeals against its own authorisation refusals, and whose leadership sits atop an entity in structural competition with the applicants it regulates, presents exactly the kind of institutional entanglement Kraipak was designed to guard against. The doctrinal question is not whether actual bias has occurred in any specific case, but whether the structure itself generates a reasonable apprehension of it and, with the given facts, it possibly does so.
DELEGATION WITHOUT LIMITS
Another concern arises from the Indian Space Policy 2023, which leaves an unmarked limit on the liability for the damage caused by space activities to guidelines that IN-SPACe itself is tasked with formulating.[9] Liability allocation is not a technical or procedural detail suited to subordinate rule-making; it is a substantive determination of who bears financial responsibility when a satellite malfunctions or debris causes harm. It is precisely the kind of question Indian administrative law expects to be settled by the legislature itself, with only its implementation delegated downward. Research on the 2023 policy has said that this leaves India without a “much-needed stable legal regulatory framework for the private sector in the absence of a Parliament-enacted law”.[10] Combined with India’s continuing state liability under the Outer Space Treaty and Liability Convention for damage caused by any space object launched from its territory by either private or state, this is harmed by the absence of a statutory liability framework, which leaves both the state and private operators in a position of genuine legal uncertainty.
THE FIX IN PROGRESS
The government has started to recognise the problem, but on a partial scale at the moment. In May 2025, the IN-SPACe chairperson announced the redraft of the space activities bill, which was a general legislative framework for India’s space sector last attempted in 2017, well before IN-SPACe itself existed; this time it was intended to grant IN-SPACe formal statutory authority, streamline authorisation procedures, and clarify liability and insurance requirements in line with India’s international treaty obligations.[11] The draft also reportedly revises the 2017 version’s controversial claim over all intellectual property generated in outer space, moving toward a more industry-friendly, case-by-case approach.[12]
Whether the drafted bill solves the bias problem of IN-SPACe identified can only be known after the enactment of the act, as granting IN-SPACe statutory authority does not by itself resolve the structural conflict of an agency adjudicating appeals against its own decisions, unless the legislation also builds in an independent appellate mechanism. A statute that merely formalises IN-SPACe’s existing single-window role, without separating its authorisation and appellate functions, would leave the Kraipak problem fully intact, as now it would fully dress itself in legislative rather than executive clothing.
CONCLUSION
India ratified the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and has operated a rapidly commercialising space sector since 2020, and yet it remains one of the few major spacefaring nations which regulates private space activity through policy and executive fiat rather than statute. It raises live questions of jurisdictional authority, structural bias, and impermissible delegation. The pending Space Activities Bill is an opportunity to correct this. Whether it does so, or merely legislates the status quo, will determine whether India’s space law finally rests on constitutional footing, or it will continue to orbit around it.
Author(s) Name: Neel Jain (S.V.K.M.s Pravin Gandhi College of Law, Mumbai)
References:
[1] Norms, Guidelines and Procedures for Implementation of the Norms Governing Provisioning of Communication Services (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre 2024) 3
[2] Aabhishek Dubey and Sagnik Sarkar, ‘The Indian space industry: key regulatory and policy developments from 2024’ (Trilegal, 10 February 2025) <https://trilegal.com/knowledge_repository/trilegal-update-the-indian-space-industry-key-regulatory-and-policy-developments-from-2024/> accessed 26 July 2026
[3] Norms, Guidelines and Procedures for Implementation of the Norms Governing Provisioning of Communication Services (n 1)
[4] ‘A New Draft for the Space Activities Bill: Amidst A Sea-Change in India’s Space Sector’ (CSDR Blind Spot, 09 June 2025) <https://csdronline.com/blind-spot/a-new-draft-for-the-space-activities-bill-amidst-a-sea-change-in-indias-space-sector/> accessed 26 July 2026
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] AK Kraipak and Ors v Union of India and Ors AIR 1970 SC 150
[8] Ibid
[9] Ankita Kumar and Tanya Srivastava, ‘Annual India NewSpace roundup: 2025’ (Lexology, 19 January 2026) <https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a739c379-0954-450b-91ab-bed56f7bf495> accessed 26 July 2026
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] ‘Space Activities Bill’ (Wikipedia) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Activities_Bill> accessed 26 July 2026