Soon, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will connect India through satellites to provide education, health and other social services to people, especially who are living in rural areas.
The operation of EDUSAT programme is being expended across the country, while ISRO is developing HEALTHSAT satellite to offer telemedicine services to public. ISRO is developing several relevant space application projects to cover more than 600,000 Indian villages. EDUSAT is the first Indian satellite built exclusively for serving the education sector. EDUSAT is providing primary education to students of rural areas. Under this project, around 885 satellite-receive terminals for primary schools have been set up in predominantly tribal areas. ISRO has also established the national beam at Ahmedabad for Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur and Chennai, Institute of Electronics and Tele-communication Engineers (IETE), National Council for Science Museums (NCSM) and Centre for Environment Education (CEE). ISRO is also providing telemedicine in remote areas like Kargil and Leh in the north, offshore islands of Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep, as well as some interior parts of Orissa, Karnataka, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir.