SITE Brought Indian-Made Television Programmes to 2,400 Villages in Six States for a Full Year From 1 August 1975, Using a NASA Satellite and Receivers Built in India

The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, known as SITE, began on 1 August 1975 and ran for a full year. Programmes made in India reached 2,400 villages in 20 districts of six states (Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, now Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), carried by NASA’s ATS-6 satellite to receivers and dishes built in India. The Planning Commission’s evaluation, published in 1981, says its field teams rated 78 per cent of the development programmes they observed as good and over 90 per cent as relevant to local conditions.

SITE was run by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with its Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad, and All India Radio. The Planning Commission’s evaluation describes it as a joint venture of NASA, ISRO and All India Radio.

The first night, 1 August 1975

Howard Galloway Jr., NASA’s project representative at Ahmedabad, wrote in his status report of 3 August 1975 that he watched the first SITE programme with his family on the lawn of the SAC campus. There were two television sets and more than a thousand viewers, and he was amazed how well so many people could see and hear. The Pij transmission, the local Gujarati service from a village in Kheda district, lost its picture synchronisation at the end because a half-inch tape had been played back on a poor machine. It was re-recorded on one-inch tape and transmitted cleanly on 2 August.

ISRO’s summary of the first two months, reproduced in the NASA reports, says every cluster was inaugurated by its chief minister or another state minister and that operations then ran without major problems.

ISRO’s summary also says the Independence Day function of 15 August 1975 was carried live from the Red Fort to the whole SITE network. Galloway wrote in his report of that date that the Prime Minister’s speech opened with a salute to SITE, which let villagers see and hear it, and that the Bombay and Calcutta television stations rebroadcast the transmission to their city viewers.

How the experiment was agreed

The Department of Atomic Energy and NASA signed a memorandum of understanding on 18 September 1969, and the full text is in the Ministry of External Affairs’ collection of treaties. It calls the project the India/US ITV Satellite Experiment Project and says its purpose was direct broadcast to rural community receivers of “Indian-developed instructional TV program material”. NASA’s history says Vikram Sarabhai asked NASA for the use of one of its ATS satellites for a year to run an instructional television experiment in Indian villages.

The memorandum split the roles. NASA would keep control of the spacecraft, while the use of the satellite for the experiment would be under the exclusive control of India. Responsibility for the programming was “entirely with India”. NASA’s commitment ran to about one year of experiment time, with no continuing responsibility implied.

The memorandum also lists the aims. India’s main instructional goals were family planning, better farming and national integration. The secondary goals were school and adult education, teacher training, other occupational skills, and health and hygiene. On the technical side, the Indian objectives included gaining experience in designing, installing and maintaining village receivers.

The memorandum contemplated approximately 5,000 receivers and said the final figure might be lower. NASA’s later history of the project speaks of 5,000 villages. ISRO, SAC, the Planning Commission and a NASA technical summary all give 2,400 villages, in six clusters of about 400 direct-reception stations each, and this article follows those figures.

What stood in the village

ATS-6 had been launched on 30 May 1974, according to NASA’s archive. Programmes were sent up from earth stations at Ahmedabad and Delhi and relayed down at 860 megahertz with a video signal and two audio channels. A NASA record written before the experiment says Indian-made antennas and television sets had been tested and met their specifications. Galloway wrote that the antenna he used for the Independence Day rebroadcast was the same 3-metre type, about 10 feet, as in the direct reception sets.

NASA’s history by Raman Srinivasan says a computer programme chose the villages specifically for their backwardness. Most had no electricity, so the sets were reworked for rural conditions and many ran on solar power and batteries. In a status report Galloway noted that battery-operated sets in Orissa were doing very well, better than mains sets, which suffered from voltage swings. The programmes arrived in a country where, according to Down To Earth, only seven cities had local television stations.

The Planning Commission’s evaluation says the programmes ran for four hours a day in two transmissions, in four languages: Hindi, Oriya, Telugu and Kannada. The morning session was for school children aged 5 to 12, and the evening session for adults, mainly people who could not read or had only just learned. NASA’s record puts the lengths at one and a half hours in the morning and two and a half in the evening.

What was on screen

All India Radio carried the main responsibility for making the programmes. Galloway’s reports mention SITE studios at Bombay and Ahmedabad and a production centre at Cuttack. ISRO’s two-month summary says the Ahmedabad studio made about nine and a half hours of Gujarati programmes for the Pij transmitter in August 1975 and about twelve and a half in September.

The Planning Commission’s team counted what the development programmes covered. They took between 17 and 30 per cent of the airtime, and three-quarters of that went to agriculture and health. Over two-fifths of the development programmes dealt with agriculture and nearly a third with health.

Teachers and the morning classes

The morning programmes were for classrooms. Galloway visited Rajasthan in October 1975, when schools were on holiday from 14 to 28 October, and reported that the satellite time was used for a training course for village teachers from 16 to 27 October instead. Each teacher in the course watched the TV programme between two lectures. The teachers, he wrote, told him the TV class was the most interesting they had ever received, and in some villages he thought school enrolment had risen.

He recorded that the training plan was meant to reach an average of ten teachers a village across at least 2,400 villages, or at least 96,000 teachers. ISRO’s history page credits SITE with training 50,000 primary-school science teachers in one year. The first number is a plan, the second is the figure ISRO gives for what was done.

What the Planning Commission found

The Planning Commission asked its Programme Evaluation Organisation (PEO) to study the experiment, and the work ran in three phases: a benchmark survey in July 1975, observation in three rounds from August 1975 to July 1976, and a repeat survey from August to November 1976. The study covered only the programmes for adults. The team picked one district in each of the six states and interviewed 2,140 households in the selected villages, with villages that had no television as controls.

The findings, from the report’s summary:

• Three-quarters of respondents felt the development programmes were useful and suited to local conditions, and over a quarter picked up detailed knowledge of the new practices shown.
• Nearly 52 per cent of viewers were in favour of applying what they learned, and 87 per cent were willing to try the practices with the information they already had.
• Gains in knowledge and attitude were highest in agriculture, followed by family planning, animal husbandry and health, and the report says knowledge improved with viewing.
• At the end of the year, a substantial number of respondents said the government took greater interest in the welfare of poorer sections, with more liberal loans and other facilities. Even occasional viewers, the report says, had a broader outlook.

What the evaluation also recorded

The same report is specific about the hardware and the audience. At best 70 per cent of the sets worked, in August 1975, and the position slipped afterwards because of electricity failures and hardware defects. Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh lost more viewing days than the other three states. The audience per set fell from about 200 to 600 people in the first round to about 60 to 80 in the third, an overall decline of 59 per cent. More than a third of respondents missed telecasts because of domestic or farm work, and about a quarter because of ill health or tiredness.

By the third round only a third of the adult household members were viewers, and the PEO says the departmental extension machinery did not adequately take part in the programmes or play its clarifying and supporting role. Srinivasan’s NASA history draws the wider lesson that rural television promised large social change and also showed the limits of technical fixes. Galloway’s reports describe the monsoon floods that cut villages off and slowed repairs, and note that ISRO was pressing state governments to supply power to every SITE village as agreed.

After 31 July 1976

The year ended on schedule, as the memorandum had anticipated. NASA moved the satellite to another orbit, and Srinivasan writes that hundreds of postcards and delegations of villagers petitioned officials to continue the broadcasts.

ISRO’s history page names what came next. The Kheda Communications Project was a field laboratory for locally made programmes in Kheda district of Gujarat, and ISRO says it was awarded a UNESCO-IPDC prize for rural communication. The Satellite Telecommunication Experiments Project (STEP) ran in 1977 to 1979 on the Franco-German Symphonie satellite, as a sequel to SITE’s focus on television. Its aims were to test geosynchronous satellites for domestic communication and to build the ground-segment skills for the planned INSAT system.

Srinivasan concludes that SITE gave ISRO expertise in building and managing the ground systems a satellite network needs, and raised the organisation’s credibility at home and abroad. The Global Media Journal’s 2025 issue on fifty years of SITE names E. V. Chitnis as programme manager, Pramod Kale as project manager for the electronics and TV hardware, and Yash Pal, director of SAC, as a key figure. How BharatNet reaches a village covers the later effort to connect villages by cable, and ISRO’s frugal space record covers its later missions.

SAC’s history page says the INSAT-2A, 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E satellites, launched in 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1999, were designed, fabricated and qualified at the centre.