The Indian television system is one of the most extensive systems in the world. Terrestrial broadcasting, which has been the sole preserve of the government, provides television coverage to over 90% of India's 900 million peopleBy the end of 1996 nearly 50 million households had television sets. International satellite broadcasting, introduced in 1991, has swept across the country because of the rapid proliferation of small scale cable systems. By the end of 1996, Indians could view dozens of foreign and local channels and the competition for audiences and advertising revenues was one of the hottest in the world. In 1995, the Indian Supreme Court held that the government's monopoly over broadcasting was unconstitutional, setting the stage for India to develop into one of the world's largest and most competitive television environments.
Broadcasting began in India with the formation of a private radio service in Madras in 1924. In the same year, the British colonial government granted a license to a private company, the Indian Broadcasting Company, to open Radio stations in Bombay and Calcutta. The company went bankrupt in 1930 but the colonial government took over the two transmitters and the Department of Labor and Industries started operating them as the Indian State Broadcasting Corporation. In 1936, the Corporation was renamed All India Radio (AIR) and placed under the Department of Communications. When India became independent in 1947, AIR was made a separate Department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
The early history of radio broadcasting in independent India is important because it set the parameters for the subsequent role of television in the country. At Independence, the Congress government under Jawaharlal Nehru had three major goals: to achieve political integration, economic development and social modernization. Broadcasting was expected to play an important role in all three areas.
It was in the context of the dominant thinking of nation building that the role of broadcasting in India that television was introduced in 1959. The government had been reluctant to invest in television until then because it was felt that a poor country like India could not afford the mediumTelevision had to prove its role in the development process before it could gain a foot-hold in the country. Television broadcasts started from Delhi in September 1959 as part of All India Radio's services. Programs were broadcast twice a week for an hour a day on such topics as community health, citizens duties and rights, and traffic and road sense. In 1961 the broadcasts were expanded to include a school educational television project. In time, Indian films and programs consisting of compilation of musicals from Indian films joined the program line-up as the first entertainment programs. A limited number of old U.S. and British shows were also telecast sporadically.
The first major expansion of television in India began in 1972, when a second television station was opened in Bombay. This was followed by stations in Srinagar and Amritsar (1973), and Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow in 1975. Relay stations were also set up in a number of cities to extend the coverage of the regional stations. Till 1975, seven Indian cities had television service and Doordarshan remained the only television channel in India. Television services were separated from radio in 1976.Each office of All India Radio and Doordarshan were placed under the management of two separate Director Generals in New Delhi. Finally Doordarshan as a National Broadcaster came into existence.In 1975, the government carried out the first test of the possibilities of satellite based television through the SITE program. SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) was designed to test whether satellite based television services could play a role in socio-economic development. Using a U.S. ATS-6 satellite and up-link centers at Ahmedabad and Delhi, television programs were beamed down for about 4 hours a day to about 2,400 villages in 6 states. The programs dealt mainly with in- and out-of-school education, agricultural issues, planning and national integration. The program was fairly successful in demonstrating the effectiveness of satellite based television in India and the lessons learnt from SITE were used by the government in designing and utilizing its own domestic satellite service INSAT, launched in 1982.
In these early years television, like radio, was considered a facilitator of the development process and its introduction was justified by the role it was asked to play in social and economic development. Television was institutionalized as an arm of the government, since the government was the chief architect of political, economic and social development in the country. By 1976, the government found itself running a television network of eight television stations covering a population of 45 million spread.