At 6 p.m. on September 10, when PDP president Mehbooba Mufti met with an accident near a nondescript place called Jhajjar Kotli along the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the news beeped on around 70,000 BSNL cellphones in J&K within 10 minutes. And at 9.05 p.m., when she reached her home in Srinagar, the subscribers were again in the know.

Welcome to the Valley’s world of SMS news services—loose, unorganised networks run by wannabe journalists, shopkeepers, pavement vendors and even government employees. And like regular media organisations, each one of them has a structured hierarchy, right from chief editor to executive editors and reporters. Over time, these newsmen have brought in innovations to their business models by appointing franchises in districts, towns and villages to get subscribers.

Mehbooba’s news was sent out by ‘Sach News Network’, which operates from the South Kashmir district of Anantnag. “Minutes after the accident, our correspondent in Udhampur, which is nearest to Jhajjar Kotli, alerted our Jammu office. They flashed the news back to us and we alerted our subscribers,” says Maqbool Veeray, the ‘chief editor’ of the service. “Nobody knew it before us. Even PDP leaders learnt about the accident through us”.

The modus operandi is simple: buy a BSNL SIM with a Rs-725 plan and use it to text news to subscribers. The plan doesn’t charge anything for calls and texts between BSNL subscribers.

The state has about 40 lakh cellphone subscribers (both pre-paid and post-paid) and three major networks—BSNL, Airtel and Aircel. Majority of the dozen-odd SMS news services in the state use BSNL SIM cards.

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