Satellite Instructional Television Experiment
The experiment was successful, as it played a major role in helping develop India's own satellite program, INSAT.
SITE was followed by similar experiments in various countries, which showed the important role satellite TV could play in providing education.
While the communist regime of China was not recognized at the time by the U.S., Brazil was also ruled out as its population was concentrated in the cities, affecting the outreach of the broadcast across the country.
India was interested in the role of satellites for the purpose of communication and asked UNESCO to undertake a feasibility study for a project in that field.
Between 18 November 1967 and 8 December 1967, UNESCO sent an expert mission to India to prepare a report on a pilot project in the use of satellite communication.
Sarabhai saw this as a great opportunity for India to expand its space program and to train Indian scientists and engineers.
Besides these social objectives, India also wanted to gain experience in all the technical aspects of the system, including broadcast and reception facilities and TV program material.
The primary US objective was to test the design and functioning of an efficient, medium-power, wide bandspace-borne FM transmitter, operating in the 800–900 MHz band and gain experience on the utilisation of this space application.
On India's request, the Intelsat-III and Arvi Earth Station organisation agreed to provide free satellite time for pre-SITE testing.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) provided assistance of $500,000 for setting up the Experimental Satellite Communications Earth Station (ESCES) at Ahmedabad and nominated the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the executing agency for this project.
UNICEF contributed to SITE by sponsoring 21 film modules produced by Shyam Benegal, a noted Indian filmmaker.
Each centre also had 2–3 full-fledged synchronised sound camera units, an editing table (Delhi had two) and a film processing plant.
Apart from the direct broadcasts, the earth station at Ahmedabad was micro-wave linked to the TV transmitter built in the village of Pij.
The LRB consisted of a simple receiver system having a 4.5 m chicken-mesh parabolic antenna with a low-noise block converter, that served as the front-end for a low-power TV transmitter at the same location.
[10] As the broadcasting time was limited, it was decided that the direct reception receivers would only be installed in 2400 villages in six regions spread across the country.
As one of the aims of the experiment was to study the potential of TV as a medium of development, the villages were chosen specifically for their backwardness.
Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal were eventually left out, as they were slated to get terrestrial television by the time SITE would end.
A special project called Operation Electricity was launched to urgently electrify the villages before the start of SITE.
Special committees on education, agriculture, health and family planning identified their own programme priorities and conveyed it to AIR.
The programmes covered health, hygiene, family planning, nutrition, improved practices in agriculture and events of national importance.
Impact on primary school children was studied under a joint project involving ISRO and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
[18] As decided in the original agreement, the SITE program ended in July, 1976 and NASA shifted its ATS satellite away from India, despite demands from Indian villagers, journalists and others such as noted writer Arthur C. Clarke (who was presented with a SITE television set in Sri Lanka) for NASA to continue the experiment.
This decline was due to several factors, including faults developing in the television equipment, failure in electricity supply, and hardware defects, as also the villagers' pre-occupation with domestic or agricultural work.
[19] Similar experiments were conducted in the Appalachian region, Rocky Mountains, Alaska, Canada, China and Latin America in the mid-seventies and early eighties.
In September 2004, India launched EDUSAT, which was the first satellite in the world built exclusively to serve the educational sector.
