Space Diplomacy: PM Modi Inaugurates South Asia Satellite Ground Station in Bhutan

BENGALURU: PM Narendra Modi, who is on his second visit to Bhutan since his re-election—furthering New Delhi’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy—among other things, inaugurated a ground station in Thimpu that was installed as part of India’s South Asia Satellite (SAS).

Launched on May 5, 2017, SAS was New Delhi’s gift to its neighbours—Bhutan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka—who will be able to access India’s satellite for their needs.

Not only has India allowed free access to satellite services, but it is also helping create the infrastructure that can help these countries utilise these services in multiple areas, such as dsaster management, TV broadcast services, meteorological data dissemination, tele-education, tele-medicine, etc.

And, all of this has a strong Bengaluru connection, other than than city-headquartered Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which launched the satellite and will provide services. The SAS project has also pushed another pet-programme of Modi’s, Make-in-India: The ground station the Prime Minister inaugurated was installed by a Bengaluru firm, Alpha Design Technologies Limited (ADTL).
K Sivan, chairman, Isro told TOI: “The ground station we’ve established is an extension of our South Asia Satellite project. And in fact, we are very happy to see how Bhutan is using these services to the maximum capacity. There are several applications that they are using in a very interesting way.”
ADTL bagged the Isro contract to establish Ku Band ground stations, installation and commissioning of independent ground networks consisting of earth stations and VSAT user terminals in April 2018.

“The scope of work included installation and commissioning of vround hub station at DITT Campus in Thimpu; setting up remote VSAT terminals in 110 locations across Bhutan; receive-only terminals at 50 locations and five portable terminals. We successfully established and completed the network, which was declared operational in January 2019,” Col (read) HS Shankar, CMD, ADTL, told TOI.

The network is extensively being used for broadcast applications currently on 24X7 basis, and ADTL claims that a very high uptime of the network is being maintained as per contract.
“The network is serving the expected social and administrative requirements of the government and people of Bhutan in the areas of television broadcasting, disaster management, education, meteorological services and emergency medical services,” Shankar added.

Source: ToI

Image Courtesy: India