Mumbai Amateur Radio Society

Lore & Background

MARS was established on 7 August 2000 by 25 active hams and has since become the largest amateur radio club in Mumbai, with over two hundred members. The club's call sign, VU2ST, was adopted in honor of the notable late ham operator Saad Ali. MARS has set up a repeater tower operating at 144.1 MHz near Nana Chowk in South Mumbai to provide line-of-sight coverage to the Mumbai agglomeration.

The club undertakes several social activities, including providing communication support during the Ganpati Visarjan, setting up a quick response team for emergencies, and monitoring flood situations during the monsoons. MARS was mobilized during the 2006 Mumbai Train Bombings, 2005 Maharashtra floods, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, and the 2001 Gujarat earthquake to provide necessary communication links after established modes of communication were severed.

MARS conducts annual classes for those interested in becoming amateur radio operators, typically from July to September, so that enthusiasts can help out during the Visarjan and JOTA. The club works closely with the Wireless and Planning and Coordination Wing (WPC) of the Ministry of Communications, Government of India, in coordinating licence exams and other activities. Future plans include persuading the Maharashtra government to introduce ham radio as a subject in school syllabi and working to shorten the waiting period for amateur radio licences, which has been reduced from two years in the 1990s to eight months.

Reader's Guide

MARS has played a significant role in emergency communications during major disasters in India, including the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, 2005 Maharashtra floods, and 2006 Mumbai Train Bombings, providing vital links when conventional communication networks failed. The club's annual involvement in the Ganpati Visarjan, with stations set up at Girgaum Chowpatty and Juhu Beach, demonstrates its ongoing commitment to public service. In 2007, 40 ham operators were involved in the event. By conducting annual training classes and coordinating with the WPC for licence exams, MARS actively promotes amateur radio in Mumbai. Its efforts to introduce ham radio into school curricula and reduce licence waiting periods reflect a long-term vision for expanding the hobby and its emergency preparedness benefits. As the largest club in the metropolis, MARS serves as a central hub for amateur radio activity and disaster response in the region.

Pioneering the Airwaves: India's First Hams

In 1921, Amarendra Chandra Gooptu, operating under the callsign 2JK, became the first person in India to receive an amateur radio licence. That same year, Mukul Bose (2HQ) followed, and together they established the nation's first two-way ham radio communication. By 1923, roughly twenty British operators were active in the country. The call sign landscape shifted in 1929 when the VU prefix replaced the earlier three-letter designations. A landmark moment arrived in 1935 when E P Metcalfe, then vice-chancellor of Mysore University, launched VU6AH, widely regarded as the country's first short-wave station dedicated to entertainment and public broadcasting. Yet despite these milestones, the community remained tiny — fewer than fifty licensed operators existed by the mid-1930s, the vast majority being British military officers stationed in India. World War II in 1939 brought a hard stop: the British government halted all new licence issuance and ordered every operator to hand over their transmitting equipment to the police, citing wartime security concerns and the risk of Axis collaboration.

Congress Radio: Mumbai's Signal in the Freedom Struggle

When Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in August 1942, the British tightened their grip on Indian media and independence activists. To circumvent the resulting censorship, Indian National Congress leaders, including Usha Mehta, turned to amateur radio operators based in Mumbai — "Bob" Tanna (VU2LK) and Nariman Printer — to help carry messages to grassroots party workers across the country. The resulting broadcast service, known as the Congress Radio, went on air on 2 September 1942, transmitting on 7.12 MHz. The signal proved remarkably powerful, carrying as far as Japanese-occupied Myanmar. This was not the first time hams had been drawn into the independence struggle; earlier, Nariman Abarbad Printer (VU2FU) had set up the Azad Hind Radio to broadcast Gandhian protest music and uncensored news, only to be promptly arrested and have his equipment confiscated. The Congress Radio's run was short-lived: by November 1942, Tanna had been betrayed by an unidentified radio officer, forcing the station to go dark. Yet the episode cemented amateur radio's place in India's fight for freedom.

From Scarcity to Surge: Two Decades of Stagnation and a Policy Turning Point

After India gained independence in 1947, the amateur radio community grew at a glacial pace. Temporary licences resumed in 1946, and by 1948 there were only fifty operators in the country, with just a dozen actually active. The first organized body, the Amateur Radio Club of India, was inaugurated on 15 May 1948 at the School of Signals in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh, before relocating to New Delhi and being renamed the Amateur Radio Society of India in 1954. For the next two decades, low public awareness and the prohibitive cost of equipment kept numbers stagnant — fewer than a thousand operators existed by 1970, and only 1,500 by 1980. Most gear was valve-based, sourced from Indian army surpluses, and the preferred mode shifted from AM to single sideband in the mid-1960s. The turning point arrived in 1984, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, himself a licensed ham (VU2RG), waived the import duty on wireless equipment. The effect was transformative: the operator count climbed to 10,000 by 2000 and surpassed 17,000 by 2007.

When the World Goes Dark: Hams as India's Emergency Backbone

Amateur radio has proven indispensable whenever conventional communications collapse. During the 1991 Gulf War, a single Indian ham operator stationed in Kuwait served as the sole communication link between stranded Indian nationals and their families back home. After the devastating 1993 Latur earthquake and the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the central government dispatched teams of ham operators to the epicentres to restore vital communication links in areas where infrastructure had been destroyed. Perhaps the most dramatic example came in December 2004, when a group of amateur radio operators on a DX-pedition in the Andaman Islands found themselves in the path of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. With all communication lines between the islands severed, the group became the only channel for relaying live updates and messages to stations around the world. Beyond these major events, hams have consistently provided voluntary emergency communications during cyclones, floods, and bomb blasts, reinforcing their role as a critical layer in India's disaster response architecture.