Jorhat (Assam): Dipanjali Kurmi can’t take her eyes off the Discovery and National Geographic television channels these days. The reason: This 21-year-old Adivasi girl from Boroera village near Titabor town in Assam wants to know about the countries where her cousins live— cousins whose names she doesn’t know and whom she has never met.
Tuned in: The Kotoky family and some plantation workers watch television through a DishTV connection. Indranil Bhoumik / Mint
“I’ve heard that centuries ago, the British took away people from the place my ancestors hailed from to far-away countries,” says Kurmi, struggling to pronounce Mauritius. Assam’s tea garden workers were mostly indentured by the British from the Chhotanagpur area of modern-day Jharkhand, which was also the source of the cheap labour they took overseas.
Helping her in the quest is the direct-to-home (DTH) digital television service that her father, Gubin Kurmi, who works in the local post office, installed at home for Rs10,000, which includes the cost of the television set. “We took a DishTV connection for Rs2,200, and now we can see more than 150 channels compared with the three Doordarshan (DD) channels we could see with our antenna earlier,” says Kurmi, who admits that the DTH connection also helps her keep abreast of life in Bangalore and Mumbai, where she has spent almost two years studying and working before returning to her mud-floored house in Assam. “I want to go back but father isn’t convinced,” says Kurmi, who has done a computer operations and programming course at a government-run vocational training institute in Bangalore.
Across districts such as Jorhat and Sivasagar in upper Assam, DTH has penetrated fast. “In Amguri town (in Sivasagar) and surrounding areas alone (which has a population of 150,000), we have 1,000-odd connections, and the numbers are growing every day,” says Vikramaditya Borthakur, area executive (sales) of Dish TV India Ltd for upper Assam and Nagaland.
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DishTV, an arm of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, wasn’t only the first firm to launch the DTH service in India, it was also the first to roll out connections in the North-East.
Jorhat and Sivasagar have been traditionally better off than other districts because most people have their own land to till and the oil and tea jobs on offer. “So when DishTV came, they jumped at it,” says Borthakur.
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Though the firm refused to disclose details such as the number of customers in the two districts of upper Assam or across the state, DishTV’s chief operating officer, Salil Kapoor, says, “We command more than 60% of the market in the North-East, which is a big market for us as it is largely either cable dry or cable frustrated.” This means that areas that have either no cable connection or have very poor connectivity.