Men on the Moon

It appears there’s a sudden glut of attempts to colonize the moon, coming from nations all over. India did launch Chandrayaan, and Chandrayaan-II is on the way. But we need to scale up and colonize, perhaps using robots, or we risk being left far, far behind. Building autonomous robots is hard; we should start robot programmes soon if we wish to get them working on the moon anytime in the near future.

NASA is talking about building a permanent manned base on the moon.
Japan is planning to send robots to build an entire base on the moon.
Italy is planning to send robots to assemble a telescope on the moon.
China is going to send exploratory rovers and, eventually, carry out a manned landing.
Russia is planning to resurrect a moon orbiter with multiple hard and soft landers.

The initial phases of many of these programmes have a 2 to 5 year timeframe.  The GSLV Mk II setback was significant because we lost a year (by optimistic estimates).  Still, ISRO’s had a good track record, and moon landings use the well-tested PSLV. Hopefully other programs won’t suffer from the GSLV problems.