Historical: Assam OnLine (AOL) Electronic Newsletter

Assam is an area that is not well-covered by the national media in India, be it the print, the radio or the televison media. News from Assam is difficult or impossible to obtain outside Assam, even inside India, not to speak of the outside world. Those with strong connections to Assam, but living outside, are starved for news. This is the reason, why we started an electronic newsletter in February of 1996 to disseminate selected news items from Assam on a regular basis. The newsletter called Assam OnLine was produced and distributed approximately two times a week. It came right to your e-mail box. It was geared toward a busy individual outside Assam who wants to keep abreast of the happenings in Assam. It was published from Assam and hence one got news unfiltered by outside Indian or foreign media. We got news from Assam because we felt that Assam is not only not covered by the national media in India, butwhenever the national media reports on Assam, it is most likely biased or sensational.

This valuable service was available for a subscription fee of US$15 per year. The Indian subscription fee was Rs 175 per year. The fee was waived for students and any other individuals who have difficulty contributing. The money raised was very small, but it met the cost of buying newspapers, magazines, typing, distributing, computer time, network access, etc.

Searching the news database on a keyword

AOL was the first electronic newsleter published from Assam. This is an archive of AOL. Our hope is that one day such an archive will help researchers and historians interested in Assam. A simple search engine is available for those who want to search the news archive on strings. So, if you want to read all the news items where the word(s) "ULFA" or "Hiteswar Saikia" or "Puranigudam" was (were) mentioned you can do so. We hope the search engine will be of service to researchers as well as curiousity seekers.

If you would like to search the news database for a keyword, please do so by filling in a simple form by clicking here.

The search program, written by Jugal Kalita, was first installed on 10/29/1996. Greg Powers, who took Jugal's CS 401---Web Programming Class, in the Fall of 1996, at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, modified the program to allow multiple keywords and AND/OR searches. This was Greg's class project.

[Currently the AOL news service is discontinued. It existed from 1996 to 1999 when the Internet was not widely available in Assam. News from various newspapers from Assam is linked in the home page of assam.org at this time.]