Oh, I just have to answer this, as the answer should have been just so obvious.
Don't the people of India just know, that the U.S. is the "center" of the world? Why don't they just accept this? (joking)
First, the Soviet Union sent their "piece of junk" satellite, Sputnick into orbit. We just couldn't let the evil Soviet Union be the center of the world, so we had to "best" them on that, and send a man to the moon. Not to be outdone, now India wants their chance, lest the U.S. go off and claim the entire universe for ourselves?
Sort of a national pride sort of thing, or a typical male "my dick is bigger than your dick" comparison thing. In civilized society, we rarely get to compete with one another such, so we substitute cars and big work trucks and oversized shiny/costly guy wristwatches and rockets and other various assorted "phallic symbols."
Actually, I think the current trend of sending much-cheaper-to-send, robots, is far better than trying to send an actual man very far from earth. Humans are just too needy. All that "life support" adds a huge amount of weight (and huge cost) to any launch. Plus, humans have this pesky insistance upon having a costly "return trip" provided for them as well.
I think for work in orbit, we should be experimenting with not sending hardly, if any, astronauts at all, and do more satellite repair work/launching by "telepresence." Let the astronauts stay on the ground, and wear their virtual reality suits, and use those to control human-shaped robots to mimic their moves. Then they can work, without costly life support, in their nice 8-hour shifts or whatever, and there's less chance of having to hastily mount expensive rescue missions when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, telepresence has its limits, because due to the limited speed of light, it takes many minutes to send and receive a signal back from Mars, or seconds, even from the moon. But I think the speed-of-light time lag approaches the "doable" level, in orbit around earth.
