Satellite route to education

President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed schoolchildren and interacted with them on the eve of Teachers’ Day. Both events, held in the national capital and televised nationally, were largely ceremonious and appeared well-rehearsed, and they demonstrated the power of communication technology tools to reach out to students across the country. The use of video-conferencing and live satellite broadcasts for education may sound archaic to many at a time when instant two-way communication, including video chat, is just a swipe away on handheld smart phones, and high-end city schools are going paperless and wireless. But the harsh reality of the Indian education sector is that technology is still a far cry in most schools, which solely depend on ‘chalk and talk’ pedagogy. The situation need not have been so had India learnt its lessons from a unique experiment in distant education it pioneered four decades ago. The 40th anniversary of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) should provide educationists and space scientists opportunity to review the role technology can play in improving the quality of education in India. 

The experiment was a result of the vision of Vikram Sarabhai, father of India’s space programme, who wanted space technology to be used for the socio-economic development of the country, particularly to reach out to people in far-flung regions. To a great extent, the Indian Space Research Organisation has been able to translate this vision into reality with satellites that provide an array of services — communication, broadcasting, weather forecasting, disaster management, locational services and so on. However, success on the education front has not been so unequivocal despite education having been the focus of its first outreach in 1975. SITE, conducted during 1975-76 using an American satellite, was the first such experiment anywhere in the world to provide proof-of-concept that satellite technology could be used for development communication. It was also a demonstration of a technology that could take satellite signals directly to homes (it was community television sets in the experiment) — a technology that would get miniaturised and commercialised as Direct-to-Home (DTH) decades later. This means that both technology and its application — hardware and software — resulting from SITE were unique.

If SITE was taken to its logical progression, India should have been a leader in both satellite television and its mass application in fields like education and health. This did not happen for various reasons. India did expand its national television network aggressively in 1980s but without any technological lessons learnt from SITE. The government chose to expand the terrestrial way — through its one-transmitter-a-day programme — and not by using satellite technology that had already been shown to be viable. Satellite-based national channel was eventually added to the network. SITE was a collaborative, inter-disciplinary programme involving engineers, scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and content developers. A host of national and international agencies like Unesco were involved in its execution. On the other hand, the expansion of Doordarshan was a largely government exercise in hardware rollout led by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. This was the first mistake. That’s why when satellite television came to India in early 1990s via STAR and Zee television, the public broadcaster was left behind in the very game in which it was a forerunner in mid-1970s.

While the government failed to see the benefits of taking the satellite route rather than terrestrial transmission, the space agency got busy with its own technology growth trajectory of designing and launching satellites and launch vehicles in the 1980s. ISRO did try to spread educational television in collaboration with agencies like the University Grants Commission and the Indira Gandhi National Open University, but the magic of SITE could not be repeated. In 2004, the space agency once again made a foray into education with its Edusat satellite. It was India’s first thematic satellite meant exclusively to provide educational services in remote areas. The objective was to overcome shortage of qualified teachers both at school and higher education levels, supplement curriculum-based education and also provide effective teacher training. In addition, the programme was meant to boost non-formal and continuing education for different groups of people. Technology-wise, it was much superior to the 1975 experiment as it provided for two-way audio and video communication and included interactive channels. The Edusat Utilisation Programme consisted of a hub and studio facility in state capitals, satellite interactive terminals in universities and colleges and receive-only terminals in schools.

Technological developments since 1975 and improved technical capability of ISRO ensured good hardware infrastructure, but serious problems arose in software or educational content. As later audits and evaluation studies found out, there was no definite plan of action for content generation and utilisation, and there was no single source identified for co-ordination and monitoring of the programme. In addition, the Edusat project suffered because of massive delays in setting up ground facilities in several states. As a result, while the satellite was up in the sky there were only few educational institutions ready to benefit from the signals it was beaming down.

The underutilisation ranged from 99 per cent in 2004-05 to 89 per cent in 2010-11 with an average of 91 per cent over, as reported by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India a couple of years back. Overall, the distant education programme of ISRO failed to be effective due to deficiencies in planning for network connectivity and content generation and the lack of a robust management structure.

The present situation with regard to education television based on satellite technology or satellite-based tele-medicine is like this: we have necessary experience, technological know-how and capability, but have inadequate software or content development strategies as well as management capacity to run such multi-agency programmes effectively. India may have lost the chance to become a leader in DTH despite having pioneered the concept four decades ago, but it still has an opportunity to use satellite technology to make headway in key areas of development like education and health. We will have to develop creative and innovative solutions using satellite, digital and mobile technologies over the next few years. ISRO alone can’t do it, as amply proven in the case of Edusat. All we need to do is revive the spirit of SITE; otherwise we will again be playing catch up when the next round of communication revolution happens, or be forced to import readymade solutions to our problems.

The writer is Fellow, Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi. Views are personal