As their aspirations grow, India and China are reaching for the moon and beyond. Their space race is part of a jostling for regional influence and prestige as well as the technological and military benefits success will bring, with India aiming to land an astronaut on the moon by 2016-18.
But despite its economic, geopolitical, and military rise, India still has more undernourished people than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. While the government has approved an ambitious plan to subsidise food for two-thirds of its population, there are questions as to whether it makes any real substantial change and how affordable it is as the country struggles to contain its fiscal deficit.
India, however, remains determined to compete with China, which has seemingly endless funds, and is set to land an exploratory craft on the moon this year with plans for a manned exploration later. Both nations also have Mars in their sights.
China is advancing into this new frontier on several fronts, sending its first man into space ten years ago and its first woman last year. It completed a spacewalk in 2008 and an unmanned docking between an orbital module and rocket last year.
Meanwhile, one of the countries caught up in this competition for the conquest of space is Sri Lanka, which is busily launching its own modest satellite program. It is doing so in co-operation with China, with whom it is forging closer ties, rather than India, leading to Indian concerns that this could pose a threat to its security.
Sri Lanka's first communications satellite was launched from China's Space Centre in Sichuan Province in November, with two more launches scheduled for June this year and December 2015.
China has sought to soothe regional security fears by creating the Asia Pacific Space Co-operation Organisation. Member states Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia, Peru and Thailand implicitly accept that China remains the leader in the field of space, just as it is in other spheres.
As India and China ramp up their space programs they are keeping a close watch on each other's progress for signs of military and technological advancement.
And China's growing ties with Pakistan are causing India concern. It fears the lessons learned from China's military space program could be passed on. Moreover, India sees China's achievements as detracting from its own prestige, making it appear to once again be playing second fiddle.
This, together with the role that space power played during the first Persian Gulf War, has caused India to increase its space efforts and dramatically shift its goals -from projects such as telemetry and transponders on fishing boats to lunar missions and military applications.
India plans to use its own lunar vehicles when it eventually reaches the moon, though they may be manufactured with Russian assistance. When the US originally declined to provide India with manned space technology citing technology transfer reasons, Russia agreed to fill the need.
India has a rover lunar mission slated for 2014. This will be a follow-on to its 2008 Chandraayan-1 lunar orbiter mission, which picked up traces of water on the moon, at a cost of $83 million.
It plans to launch a Mars-orbiting vehicle by 2018 to counter China's plans for a Mars exploration mission. These programs will build on India's 2009 all-weather satellite which watches over Pakistan and China, and its planned 2013 global navigation system, which will remove the need for its military to rely on the US's Global Positioning Satellite system.
India has formed an integrated Space Cell staffed with members of the army, navy and air force to plan shorter-term military applications of space and in the longer term for a Military Space Command.
The Indian Space Research Organisation is central to this endeavour. Though created for civilian applications of space, it has been tasked with providing the armed forces with launch vehicles and other technology, together with its overall space expertise.
New Delhi's decision that new space vehicles will be controlled by the military Space Cell rather than the civilian ISRO provides an insight into its strategic thinking. Furthermore, there are signs that India is developing its own anti-satellite capacity as a counter to China's. It is expected that China's anticipated Dong Ning-2 ASAT missile, reportedly capable of striking US navigation satellites in 19,000km, will spur on India's own military space applications.
As with virtually every other Indian endeavour, though, its space program is not quite all it seems.
After an extended period of US-led technology boycotts, India's space scientists have had, of necessity, to pretty much reinvent the wheel.
It is still something of a mystery that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, New Delhi did not accept the offer of hundreds of Soviet scientists to work for its nuclear and space research programs.
The fact that Moscow helped Beijing with its space program would indicate that it would have given New Delhi even greater technological help if it had asked.
And India has a major problem in that its space workhorse, the PSLV rocket, is not powerful enough to use in a manned mission. And while the more powerful GSLV is able to do the job, it is beset by technological problems.
India, however, is intent on pursuing the space race with all its national prestige and glory. The question is, whether the power and the glory will be lost on the millions still trapped in a cycle of poverty.