Article ID: CBB468867650

Whose India? SITE and the origins of satellite television in India (2020)

unapi

Siddiqi, Asif A. (Author)


History and Technology
Volume: 36
Issue: 3-4
Pages: 452-474


Publication Date: 2020
Edition Details: Special Issue: Development Interventions: Science, Technology, and Technical Assistance
Language: English

This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.

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Associated with

Article Gisela Mateos; Edna Suárez-Díaz (2020) Development interventions: science, technology and technical assistance. History and Technology (pp. 293-309). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB468867650/

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Authors & Contributors
Barton, Jenifer
Schaefer, Agnes Schaefer
Rubio-Varas, Maria del Mar
Miller, Haynes R.
Torre, Joseba De la
Odom, Brian C.
Concepts
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Education
Educational technology
Space programs
Satellites, artificial
Educational change
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
Places
United States
India
Spain
New York (U.S.)
Institutions
United Nations
Project Mercury (U.S.)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
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