India to become largest country with TV set every household: Javadekar

Team Udayavani, Jun 22, 2019, 5:36 PM IST

Srinagar: Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar on Saturday said India will soon become the largest country in the world where every household has a television set.

“There is a new dream that every household will have a TV in the coming years. There are 25 crore households in India and 18 crore have a TV set. There are still seven crore households without a TV,” Javadekar said here.

Javadekar also launched the first news bulletin in Dogri that will be aired on DD Kashir on a daily basis from Saturday evening.

“Today, we are making a small beginning in which we are giving set-top boxes of free Dish TV for people living in far flung areas and to poor people. However, as soon as our economy develops people will buy a TV as soon as they are able to address the six basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education and livelihood,” the minister said.

He said in near future, India will be the largest nation with TV in every household. “This is my belief.”

Javdekar said television has seen massive expansion over the past three decades with mushrooming of channels in late 1990s while Doordarshan being the only channel in 1970s.

“Today we have more than 700 TV channels on various fields. There was revolution in this field after private channels come up in 1992-93,” he said.

The minister gave credit for the spread of TV across the country to the introduction of cable TV.

“The cable connected one home to another, then one locality to the next, and it ended up connecting the people as well. Even today, there are nine crore households where cable TV is watched,” he said.

Jitendra Singh, the Minister of State in Prime Minister’s Office, told the gathering that free DTH connections will help in the dissemination of information in border areas which are not well connected by roads or other communication means.