By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
There is a period of Kunwer Sachdev’s business history that tends to get overshadowed by the inverter story — the years when Su-Kam was the company you called if you wanted satellite television installed at the highest levels of Indian government and military command.
It happened because of EchoStar.
The Distributorship
In the early 1990s, EchoStar was one of the largest satellite television companies in the world. An American company with its own satellites and its own hardware ecosystem — receivers, dish antennas, signal distribution equipment — it was looking for distributors in India’s emerging cable and satellite market. Kunwer had been attending international trade exhibitions for years by this point, building relationships with equipment manufacturers and staying current with technology that had not yet reached India. When the opportunity to take on EchoStar’s distributorship came, he was positioned to recognise its value.
The partnership was a gateway into the broadcast infrastructure that Doordarshan — India’s government television network — was building out. At the time, Doordarshan had a mandate that serves as some context: it was responsible for installing satellite dish antenna systems at the residences of Very Very Important Persons across the country. Ministers, military chiefs, senior civil servants. The television signal needed to reach them with reliability, and the equipment needed to work without visible failure.
Kunwer’s company, carrying EchoStar’s hardware and the credibility that the partnership conferred, became one of the suppliers and installers for this programme.
The List of Houses
The scope of what followed is worth stating plainly.
Su-Kam’s dish antennas and cable TV systems were installed at the Prime Minister’s residence. The President’s residence. The homes of the Chiefs of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. The Home Secretary. The Defence Secretary. Across the apparatus of the Indian state’s senior-most offices and residences, there were satellite systems that had been supplied and installed by a small Delhi company founded by a young engineer who had not yet turned thirty.
This was not, to be clear, a function of political connections or procurement lobbying in the usual sense. It was a function of being the right distributor at the right moment with the right equipment. Doordarshan needed reliable suppliers. EchoStar needed ground-level execution. Kunwer’s team had the technical competence, the importing relationships, and the willingness to handle the complexity of installations at high-security locations with demanding standards.
But the reputational consequences were enormous and lasting. When the question of a company’s reliability came up — from dealers, from large institutional buyers, from future government tender processes — the answer could include the fact that the same systems were running, without issue, in the houses of India’s military chiefs and the country’s first and second citizens.
No marketing budget could have bought that.
Subroto Park: Learning the Hard Way
Around the same period, Kunwer took on a different kind of project — one that taught him a more complicated set of lessons.
He was given the opportunity to run a cable TV network at Subroto Park Air Force Station in Delhi. This was not installation work; it was operations. Managing subscriptions. Collecting monthly fees. Running a small staff. Handling the relationship between a private business and a military establishment.
He brought in a partner to help manage the day-to-day work, creating a small joint venture to run the service. The partnership eventually soured. There was a dispute — the details of which he has never publicised — and he ended up having to walk away from the business entirely.
The financial loss was real. The time lost was real. But the Subroto Park years also built something that proved more durable than the venture itself: direct relationships with the Air Force as an institution. When the cable TV service ended, the contacts remained. Those contacts subsequently opened doors to contracts for installing cable TV systems at Air Force stations across the country. And through the Air Force, introductions to the Army and Navy followed.
The military network that Su-Kam would later leverage — for large institutional power backup contracts, for credibility in government procurement, for the kind of reference customer that gives other customers confidence — had its roots in a cable TV venture that technically ended in a dispute.
The Market Shift
The cable TV era did not end gracefully. In the mid-1990s, large national operators began entering the market — companies with import connections and the capital to bring in foreign equipment at scale. Local manufacturers of cable TV components found themselves competing against imported products backed by professional procurement operations. The economics changed faster than smaller players could adapt.
Kunwer recognised the shift early. The business he had built was not going to survive the next phase of the cable TV market as it was currently structured. But the technologies he understood, the networks he had built, the discipline of R&D that the cable TV years had established — all of that was portable. It would move with him into the next chapter.
He had one more attempt before the pivot. Seeing the future of digital television clearly — the way satellite signals were going to be compressed and distributed using digital encoding technology — he contacted a Canadian startup he had met at a Singapore exhibition and invested in a joint project to develop a digital set-top box. It failed. The startup lacked the engineering maturity for the project. The money was gone.
The lesson he took was not that foreign technology partnerships were a mistake. It was that R&D could not be outsourced. You could not hand the critical technical work to people you could not monitor, correct, or motivate directly. If Su-Kam was going to innovate, it had to build the capability internally.
He closed the cable TV chapter of the business in 2000. The inverter chapter had already begun, quietly, two years earlier.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev