New Delhi: Taking a hard look at television news content, quality and reportage, former journalist Nalin Mehta's new book "India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act" traces the growth and evolution of television in India and its impact on society.

There are more than 50 round-the-clock television news networks operating in India in 11 different languages. Most of them came on the scene between 1992 and 2006. The book, published by HarperCollins, traces the evolution of satellite television and how it affected major changes in the India's political culture in seven detailed chapters.

According to the book, upheavals in the nature of Indian television have been accompanied by a simultaneous expansion in its reach and penetration. Citing numbers, it says that if you divided India's population of 846,388,000 in 1992 by the total number of television sets in the country, the number of people clustering around a television set would have been a little over 26.

By 2006, the ratio had come down to over 10 people per television set, despite a substantial increase in population. In a little over a decade, the total number of Indian television households tripled to an estimated 112 million, making India the third largest television market behind China and the US. More than 60 percent of the television sets are now connected to satellite dishes.

Mehta explains how television was adapted to suit Indian conditions and how it used new technology to plug into existing existing modes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language - national, regional and local.

According to him, "India on Television" is also the story of the country's tryst with globalisation and is based on a simple premise - when television enters society, it alters society.