The “idiot box”, a good teacher!

The same year that India launched its first satellite, our space scientists launched another massive, ambitious and one-of-a-kind project. The British science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke would describe it as the “greatest communications experiment in history.” This is the story of a project that would leverage space technology and bring its benefits to the common man’s doorstep.

Show Notes

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators.

We thank wholeheartedly all our guests who appeared on this episode.

• EV Chitnis
• Pramod Kale
• BS Bhatia

References

• Emergency 1975, a special broadcast – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ogj1mtyWR4
• Indira Gandhi’s address to the nation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lX8OJrWGZM
• ISRO and Vikram Sarabhai during it’s early years – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2S_9RRbK0Q

Full Transcript of Episode 9

News Announcement
Bhaiyon aur behnon, rashtrapatiji ne aapatkaal ki ghoshna ki hai, isse aatankit hone ka koi karan nahi hai

A few minutes before midnight on June 25, 1975, President Fakhruddin Ahmed declared a state of internal Emergency in the country. He did this on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. 

The government had suddenly suspended a number of democratic freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of India. This included freedom of speech and assembly.

Indira Gandhi claimed that the Emergency was necessary because there were internal and external threats to the Indian state. 

Indira Gandhi (Speech on TV)
The campaign of law-breaking, paralysing national activity and inciting our security forces to indiscipline and disobedience would have led to economic chaos and collapse and our country would have become vulnerable to fissiparous tendencies and external danger. With the fumes of hatred having cleared somewhat, we can see our economic goals with greater clarity and urgency. The Emergency provides a new opportunity to go ahead with our economic tasks.

Within hours after the announcement, the supply of electricity to all major newspapers was cut. Police vans roamed the streets of Delhi through the night and many of Indira Gandhi’s political opponents were arrested by morning and sent to jails. 

What began that night lasted for 22 months! It is considered one of the darkest phases in Indian democracy.

Now, interestingly, right in the middle of this national crisis, I-S-R-O quietly carried out a massive and ambitious project called the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment or SITE. This was an experiment that had been Vikram Sarabhai’s dream. And ISRO had been preparing for it for almost 7 years! 

The experiment was a resounding success.

In fact, the British Science writer Arthur C Clarke described SITE as… 

“the greatest communications experiment in history.”

From ATS Studio, this is Mission I-S-R-O, a Spotify original podcast about how India reached space. I’m Harsha Bhogle.

Recap

In the previous episode, I took you behind the scenes of the Aryabhata project. 

In April 1971, the Soviets offered to help India launch its first satellite. Vikram Sarabhai immediately jumped at the offer. UR Rao, who is known today as the Satellite Man of India led the team that built a 360kg satellite from scratch in makeshift sheds in the Peenya Industrial Estate in Bangalore. The under-30 team accomplished this incredible feat with little to no help or experience. 

Finally, on 19th April 1975, Aryabhata took off majestically aboard the Interkosmos rocket from the Kapustin Yar launch site near Volgograd in the USSR. However, four days after it was placed in orbit, there was a power failure and the scientific experiments that the satellite was supposed to conduct came to a stop. Despite this setback, Indian space scientists weren’t demoralised. After all, it was still quite unbelievable that an amateur team of space scientists had managed to design and build a satellite that could be sent to space.

Thanks to their effort, a small piece of India had reached space.

Out of the three big projects of ISRO at the time, one was thus completed. It was time for the second big project.

And here we go

***

Montage of TV show sound tracks

Now, that’s a trip down memory lane and… a journey that spans more than half a century.

Today, our relationship with television is something that is taken for granted. In most homes, the ‘idiot box’ as it is called, is a permanent fixture – giving us our daily dose of drama either through soap operas or even the news. But back in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the first television set entered India, it wasn’t welcomed with open arms. 

The TV was considered a luxury. Many people, including a few of our leaders, felt that India at that time, consumed by poverty and hunger, didn’t need it at all. 

Even Jawaharlal Nehru who was the Prime Minister then felt that there was no urgency for India to embrace the television. He felt it was mainly a tool for middle class entertainment.

But, in America, around the same time, there was an interesting discussion on the potential of television. Communication scholars like Wilbur Schramm argued that mass media devices like the television could play an important role in national development, especially in countries that have low literacy rates. How? Schramm wrote about it in his book Mass Media and National Development.

He said a device like the television is a perfect tool to pass on information to a large semi-literate or illiterate population. This information could be about health care, agriculture, the economy and so on – basically information related to national development. Second, he argued that mass media devices can also play the role of a teacher, especially in countries that do not have enough schools or teachers.  

These were new ideas back then.

Incidentally, there were a few Indians who shared Wilbur Schramm’s views. One of them was in fact someone who Schramm knew personally. 

Vikram Sarabhai.

Well, of course. 🙂

Vikram Sarabhai (Speech)
Particularly in a country like India where the large mass of people who have to be motivated are illiterate, it is very important to I think have the information input as an integral part of the developmental process 

This is Vikram Sarabhai speaking about the transformative potential of television in India.

Vikram Sarabhai (Speech)
And I think a powerful technique like an audio-visual presentation through television can be one of the most important motivations, a catalyst for action.

Sarabhai also believed that television could be used to accelerate development in India. 

Previously in this podcast, I told you how Sarabhai had begun thinking about television and communications satellites way back in 1963 itself.

Let me recap that story for you in some detail.

After the USSR launched Sputnik, a disappointed America immersed itself in developing its satellite programme with renewed vigour. And soon, the Americans became known for their competence in remote sensing satellites and communications satellites. 

A communications satellite basically has the ability to receive signals from the Earth and re-transmit those signals back to the Earth using high-frequency waves. It’s like light reflecting off a mirror.

Say, you want to send messages between New Delhi and Mumbai. Without satellites, you will have to connect the two using a physical wire. But, with satellites, a station in Delhi can beam up high frequency signals to a spot where the satellite hovers in space. This satellite acts like a mirror and transmits this signal towards Mumbai. All you need in Mumbai is a receiver to tap this signal and make sense of it.

One of the most common applications of this is satellite television. The large towers and antennae in production houses send up the signal, and the small dish attached to your terrace or roof is the receiver. While today, this is something that is common knowledge, back in the 1960s, this technology was still being tested.

Sometime in the early 1960s, NASA began working on a series of communication satellites called the Application Technology Satellites or the ATS series. One of the people supervising the building and design of this series was none other than Wernher Von Braun. 

Remember him? 

The man who invented the V2, the infamous missile rocket whose technology powered the first space rockets.

Anyway, there were six satellites in the ATS series and the last one, ATS-6, was hoping to transmit content directly onto receivers on the ground. This was similar to the satellite TV infrastructure that we have today but not as advanced of course. 

The ATS-6 would go on to become the world’s first direct broadcast satellite and the world’s first educational satellite. And one of the experiments that NASA planned to conduct using the ATS-6 was the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment or SITE. This experiment wanted to use satellite broadcasting to impart educational information to people via televisions. And it wanted to test two things: First, will this technology work? And second, will people benefit from this? 

NASA was looking for a collaborator for SITE and since this was a mass broadcast experiment, they were looking for a country with a relatively large population. Two countries were close contenders: India and Brazil. If you remember, Brazil had also previously competed with India for the UN sponsorship of the sounding rocket facility.

ATS-6’s lifespan was two years. So, the plan was that NASA would first use ATS-6 for its experiments and then loan the satellite the next year to a country that it chooses. 

NASA set up a committee to decide who the sponsorship should go to – Brazil or India — and this is where it gets interesting. The man heading the committee was none other than… Wilbur Schramm. 

EV Chitnis, one of ISRO’s pioneers and a scientist we’ve heard a lot from in this podcast, tells us.

EV Chitnis
Wilbur Schramm, he was a social scientists…a…communication scientists from the software side, not hardware…and Vikram Sarabhai.. knew him personally and …he gave a decision in favour of India. That is how America decided that ATS will be used by India for one year, and then the Americans will have the responsibility for building the programmes… And …that is the … the space segment and we will be responsible for ground segment in India

If you recall, India also had another friend at NASA, Arnold Frutkin, the man in-charge of international affairs. He also played a huge role in ensuring that the collaboration with India materialised.

Now, India had no infrastructure at that time to develop the ground segment either. A ground segment involves an earth station which can send and receive signals from a satellite. 

But luckily Sarabhai had thought about this too. 

In 1963 itself, he approached the United Nations Development Programme or the UNDP for a grant to develop an earth station. This was around the time that Sarabhai was already in talks with the UN for the  sponsorship of Thumba. So it wasn’t a big hassle. The UN eventually gave India a whopping grant of 1 million dollars to set up an earth station. In today’s money, it is around 3,500 crores.

EV Chitnis
We told UNDP that we will also not only develop the earth station but we will start a training programme for people, for engineers from developing countries, because developing countries will not build satellite but they will have the ground station technology or ground stations or Earth station, as they were called..both.

The agreement with NASA about borrowing ATS-6 was finally signed in 1969, around the time that INCOSPAR became ISRO.

But let me pause the story here and skip back two years to 1967. I want to tell you another story about a small but significant project.

January 26, 1967. Republic Day.

Villagers in 80 villages around Delhi gathered in front of a single television set placed at the centre of their village. The excitement was palpable. 

Many of them were about to watch their first ever television programme. 

And this was a show specifically made for them.

It was among India’s earliest television programmes and the best part is that even today, it is the longest running television show in India.

What am I talking about?

Krishi Darshan. Still running on tv, Krishi Darshan is a programme that gives farmers and villagers information related to agriculture. It is Doordarshan that comes to our mind when we talk about Krishi Darshan but actually, it is the space programme and Sarabhai who were the brains behind the show.

Here’s the story.

While the agreement with NASA was still being finalised, Sarabhai was impatient to see if television could indeed play a role in national development, specifically rural development. Like I said earlier, television in India was not considered an important tool for development. But Sarabhai felt differently. He thought that if ISRO can show that television could help farmers, then perhaps the government will be interested in investing in a satellite television programme in the future.

So, in 1967, two years before he signed the NASA agreement, he put together a team of scientists and engineers and asked them: Can we do a dry run? This team included scientists like UR Rao and a young management graduate from IIM Ahmedabad called Kiran Karnik. 

In 1967, we didn’t have satellite infrastructure nor did India have a lot of televisions at that time. The only television transmitter back then was with the Doordarshan. Like radios, these towers transmit signals in a limited area. Aerials on top of houses can receive these signals. Not many places in India have aerials now, but some of you may remember how it looks: a bunch of sticks placed in a neat pattern over a long rod – much like the skeleton of a fish. 

So, Sarabhai and his team got All India Radio and Doordarshan to collaborate with them and they managed to get 80 TV sets which they placed in 80 different villages around Delhi. The next task was to decide the kind of programme that could be broadcast. 

Since this was a rural experiment, they decided that it would have to be about agriculture. So, the team roped in the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the father of Green of Revolution in India – MS Swaminathan. Together, they created a programme that gave farmers information related to crops, prices, pesticides, monsoons and so on.

And thus, Krishi Darshan was born and was appreciated by its audience. 

So, even if it was on a very small scale, Krishi Darshan proved to both Sarabhai, his team of space scientists as well as the Indian government that television could indeed play a role in passing on useful and important information to an illiterate population. That it can, after all, be of use to the country.

Vikram Sarabhai (Speech)
India has half a million villages and if we want to really create the counter-forces to urbanisation which everybody agrees has its own great problems. If you want to see that some of our best people continue and can have a meaningful and qualitatively rich experience even if they are in villages, then we can use these new techniques to bridge that information gap, that contact with the wider sphere in the world. 

That was Sarabhai explaining what he had in mind. Now, it was not like Sarabhai was against television being used for entertainment. 

Pramod Kale
See, Dr. Sarabhai had very clearly said that he doesn’t have problems with people using it for entertainment. That is not the issue. We should use it for instruction as well as for entertainment.

That’s Pramod Kale, another pioneer of the space programme.

Right. So, the stage was thus set for SITE. Krishi Darshan could cover only 80 villages. But with the help of a communications satellite, SITE could cover many, many more villages.

The team that Sarabhai put together for SITE included engineers and scientists like Kiran Karnik, Pramod Kale, BS Bhatia as well as social scientists like Binod Aggarwal among others. All of them reported to EV Chitnis. Their first task was to select the villages that would participate in SITE. Sarabhai decided that 2,400 villages would be chosen and they were to be selected from across the country.

We interviewed BS Bhatia, a veteran ISRO engineer who was in the team in charge of choosing the villages.

BS Bhatia
I was asked.to..you see in SITE, we had to select 2400 villages where DRS or the direct reception sets were to be installed. So I was asked to select the states and the districts and the 2400 villages where we would be installing these DRSs. So as per the original idea we started with selecting the most backward states. The Planning Commission had defined the backwardness of each state and the number of districts that were backward in each state. So we made a list of those states and the districts within that state which were amongst the most backward. And these are of course to be finalised in consultation with Doordarshan – at that time it was All India Radio later it became Doordarshan. And Dr. Sarabhai was very keen that we could go to the most remote parts of the country. 

Both Kiran and myself had a meeting with him in Bombay. And he said that don’t give up Chhattisgarh, Chattisgarh is tribal area. And I want to study the impact of television and whatever I have to do, even if I have to buy a helicopter for maintenance, I will do that. But we should not give up. I said fine. Soon after that we had a meeting with the Doordarshan. Doordarshan of course was a little reluctant to go to very –distant locations. We stuck to our guns. 

Unfortunately, Sarabhai passed away a few months after this meeting and all the work related to SITE came to a grinding halt.

By the time Dr. Satish Dhawan took over the space programme, the SITE team had to give up a number of backward districts including the ones in Chhattisgarh. Doordarshan which was a key partner in this project, was not keen to go to remote locations.

Now, when Satish Dhawan took over, the ISRO office in Ahmedabad got a new identity – it became the Space Applications Centre or the SAC, a centre that was solely focused on harnessing the applications of space technology. Quite naturally then, SITE came under the SAC. 

The SAC was also given a new head: Prof. Yashpal, a hugely respected scientist who was from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. 

In 1973, as soon as Prof. Yashpal joined, one of the first projects he had to handle was of course SITE. By this time, ATS-6’s launch date had been fixed for 1974. And it would be in position for SITE by 1975. 

The clock was ticking and there was a lot left to do.

First, some progress was made in the selection of villages for the experiment. Six states were chosen: Andhra Pradesh, 

Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, And Rajasthan. 

Now, within each state, 400 villages had to be selected. And this was no easy task.

It was a backbreaking process done at a time when there were no computers or even STD phones! The team picked up census handbooks and studied nearly 24,000 villages. The list was then narrowed down to 6,000 villages and teams of two were sent to visit these 6,000 villages to check if they were suitable.

BS Bhatia
We had 24 teams, this each team consi-  consisted of one engineer and one software person. The  engineer, they belonged to Pramod Kale’s team and software person, they belonged to Vinod Agarwal’s team and they would go to each village to collect information about whether there is a suitable place for putting the TV set, whether electricity connection is there or not. And who would be the person responsible, land various other details. And the engineer would also check whether the building is suitable to install the antenna and whether it will have a clear look at the satellite. 

Now, it was not like these teams on the field could just pick up the phone and call their supervisors to update them about the status of a particular village. They had to write telegrams. Every morning, Bhatia and others would then collect the telegrams, go through them and then discuss the next course of action.

Before approaching a village, the teams would first go and meet the chief secretary of the state and brief him about the project. Then they would request the chief secretary to identify one person who can be their point of contact for a particular district. This person would then brief the district collectors.

Simultaneously, ISRO’s engineers also went to each district and told the district collector and superintendent of police about the project – what they planned to do, how a satellite sends a signal to a television set and so on.

After all this talk and assessment, once a village was selected, another team would go and set up the hardware for the project, including the television sets and the dish.

BS Bhatia: 10:57: In ISRO what we had is that for every task, we will identify one person and he will go to the field and get it done. Now, for example, the field – one task was electricity because see what we found: we had selected villages which has electricity. But we had selected school buildings. Now school buildings did not have electricity. So more than 80% of the schools – because schools work only during the day, so they never had electricity, we had to bring electricity to each school. So this was one task. Similarly, who will be the custodian of the TV set once we hand it over to the village, so some person in the village whether it is a Sarpanch or someone – someone should be responsible to take charge of. 

Apart from the government and the police, ISRO scientists had to also field a bunch of questions from the villagers themselves.

BS Bhatia
See, the main thing was to tell them ke T.V. ayega and antenna, we used to call it ulti chhatri. So, ulti chhatri lagenyenge, yaha upar, satellite pe TV programme ayega aur raatko aap dekh sakenge. Our villages, they accept new technology very easily. It is only the city people who find it difficult to accept it. 

If a village did not have a school, then the television set would be kept in the Panchayat office. If even that was not available, then the last resort would be a temple.

India, back then, didn’t even have 2,400 televisions to spare for this experiment. But as always, Sarabhai had already solved the problem. 

The Electronics Corporation of India or the ECIL, a department that Sarabhai was instrumental in setting up, manufactured the TVs needed for this experiment.

Alright. Now, if you remember, as part of the ground-based equipment for this project, an earth station had to be set up. Using UNDP’s grant, ISRO built an earth station in Ahmedabad but it also wanted to set up a backup station in Delhi. 

When a team from ISRO finalised the location for it in Delhi, the Airforce wasn’t happy. 

They were worried that the earth station would interfere with their communication and navigation frequencies. Prof. Yashpal and others tried their best to persuade them but they wouldn’t budge. Finally, the Prime Minister had to intervene. 

After hours of discussions, she came up with a workable compromise – an earth station would be built in Delhi after all, but it would function only for a year. 

It’s a different matter that this earth station is still operational today.

Anyway, by the time all of this fell in place, the start date for the experiment had almost arrived. The ATS-6 would soon reach its designated spot: 36,000 km above the equator over Kenya, ready to unfurl its antenna and communicate with India. 

But, was ISRO ready?

BS Bhatia
We had regular – almost every six months a review meeting with NASA and NASA would review every aspect of the readiness.  Readiness of Earth station, readiness of DRS, readiness of programme production facilities, each and every aspect was reviewed by NASA. And there was a time when Prof Dhawan took place, took charge that NASA was not satisfied with the readiness, and we were all worried. But then Prof Dhawan had a very good meeting with NASA in Delhi. I remember Hotel Claridges. We were having a meeting, when all this was reviewed, and then Prof. Dhawan really convinced NASA that we will be ready. 

During the experiment, the plan was to broadcast four hours of educational content every day. Doordarshan and All India Radio were responsible for creating these educational programmes. But ISRO’s scientists dabbled in this as well – especially in the creation of science programmes for both adults as well as children. The man who took the lead on this was Prof. Yashpal 

BS Bhatia
He had a group of experts from TIFR, from community centre and all that and he said that students in villages do not have any laboratory. They do not have any instrument. So, I don’t want to make science programmes which are dependent on these things. So, he developed a credo or a philosophy, which he also did in…was the Science is all around you and you can observe science you can and you can conduct…sort of understand science by observing your environment. So, for example, if you take a bicycle. Now, in bicycle, air pressure. So, he will talk about air pressure, we will talk about balancing, centre of gravity. Even same thing you did with with our Stove. That you stove, you pump the stove, this thing comes out through heat, gas. You take a village lake and the buoyancy and ball floats and you float. So a complete syllabus was developed of about 200 programmes on science, which will cover all aspects like measurement, and various other things was developed. For example, measurement. You don’t start with any foot or something. Boys are playing Marble, and they measure the distance with their palm. Then two boys measure and it is different. Oh, tumhare mein toh 3 hote hai, mere mein 5. So, now what to do. So, you should have something standard. So, you pick up something standard and tell them okay then you have foot rule to measure. So, like this several experiments were there. These programmes were produced in Bombay, many film industry people were also involved in this. There was a very good group of production and which was involved in this. 

Finally, D-Day arrived, the time when this massive experiment was going to be put to its ultimate test. 

August 1, 1975. 

It had been a little more than a month since the emergency was declared. But interestingly, the emergency did not come in the way of ISRO’s work or the SITE project at all.

EV Chitnis
It didn’t affect us at all because being a technical department directly under Prime Minister. So we were reporting to the Prime Minister. We were insulated from all the political part which was handled by Doordarshan and other different ministries. So SITE went on merrily I would say. 

That’s EV Chitnis.

Indira Gandhi, much like her father, also believed strongly in the merits of the space programme. She had seen Vikram Sarabhai’s work and had also followed the progress of the SITE programme.

In fact, it was she who finally inaugurated the programme in August 1975. 

That day, at the appointed time, Indira Gandhi appeared on 2400 television screens addressing countless villagers.

BS Bhatia
I was in Ahmedabad, we saw Mrs. Gandhi on TV, inaugurating this. And there was one feedback, that one old lady when she saw Mrs. Gandhi on the TV, she went around the TV to see ke kaha baithi hai. So that was the kind of thing.

For so many of them, this was the first time they were seeing a moving image on a screen. For days, people huddled in front of the community television sets trying to forge a relationship with this small device that suddenly had so much to show and say to them.

ISRO’s scientists had pulled off yet another remarkable feat.

BS Bhatia
Yeah, I think we were all very happy. I think it was a very unique experience.

Prof Yashpal had put it like that, that we were working on site was one thing, but site worked on us. And each one of us was transformed. And therefore, the engineer became more of a software person, the software person became more of an engineer, and that amalgamation of personalities and disciplines took place.

SITE was a year-long project. And every single telecast, every single day was closely monitored. Anthropologists and scientists were stationed in many of these villages taking down notes on the impact of SITE. ISRO’s scientists also collected feedback from the villagers – especially on how the technology performed.

BS Bhatia
In fact, I had developed a postcard with 30 days table on it, and I had given it to the custodian that this jis din TV nahi chale, us din aap uske upar cross marke aur mahine ke end mein postcard — because it self addressed, prepaid postcard — aap mujhe bhejiye. So he would send it to me and then we compiled what was the number of days when the TV set did not function sp that was hardware monitoring. So and .. our available earth stations worked with 99.9% reliability. The DRS worked with something like 78% reliability. 

An evaluation report of SITE released in 1981 says that the respondents in this experiment, that is the villagers, showed that they had gained more knowledge in the fields of agriculture, family planning, animal husbandry and health. It also said that even occasional viewers of television found that their outlook had broadened and changed considerably.

The “idiot box” had actually proven to be a good teacher! 

SITE was also particularly successful in attracting women and children as audiences. It was found that they were the keenest learners.

The entire experiment was also being watched closely by one man, sitting all the way in the island nation of Sri Lanka. British science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, the man who wrote about space way before it became a reality, had also been presented with a SITE TV set. It was Satish Dhawan who arranged a TV set for him.

Clarke described his impression of SITE in the most legendary way possible — “the greatest communications experiment in history!”

Quite obviously, SITE also had a significant impact on the space programme itself. Technologically, what it had achieved was massive — and that too in such a short time. And it did give both scientists in ISRO and the government some confidence about investing in communications satellites in the future — something that today, we are all a little too thankful for.

BS Bhatia
National point of view, I think it really introduced satellite television to this country. I don’t think our decision makers would have been so fast in moving towards satellite technology, had site not taken place. So site has demonstrated, beyond doubt, the functioning of satellite technology to reach out to the whole country.

Just six years after SITE, India would send its first communications satellite to space: the Ariane Passenger PayLoad Experiment or APPLE. On August 13, 1981, Indira Gandhi dedicated this satellite to the nation and called it the ‘Dawn of India’s satellite communication era’.

After APPLE, came the Indian National Satellites or the INSAT series which revolutionized television in India. 

All of this thanks to ISRO, Krishi Darshan and SITE. So far, space technology was used as a means to journey out into the unknown. But here was an instance when it was brought to people’s homes.