MUMBAI: Hasan Kazmi can’t do without his weekday fix of Mahabharat and Devon Ke Dev... Mahadev. He avidly watches the television serials on his Videocon direct-to-home (DTH) connection.Nothing odd about this, except that Kazmi is based in Karachi and is using a set-top box he bought on the black market. For Pakistani viewers hooked on Indian TV, an entire ecosystem has evolved to help foster the habit.It’s based on illegal direct-to-home (DTH) subscriptions and depends on the hawala system to ensure payments made in Pakistan are received in India. Kazmi’s connection, for instance, is registered in India under a bogus name.Tracing such subscriptions is near impossible, Videocon chairman Venugopal Dhoot told ET. And, geographical proximity means it’s impossible to stop the signal from being downloaded in Pakistan.He said such illegal subscriptions are also available in the Gulf, which has a large population from the subcontinent. “We are aware the settop boxes are smuggled to Pakistan and the Middle East, with registration done in Delhi or other Indian states. There’s no way for a service provider to fix this problem,” said Dhoot.The process works through a well-connected set of ‘dealers’ in India and Pakistan who place orders and even service requests on occasion through email and Skype.The Pakistani consumer pays locally in cash and the money is transferred to the Indian counterpart through the hawala network, a parallel remittance system operating outside the purview of the traditional banking system.Pakistan, which doesn’t have any DTH services, has around threecrore households, of which 80% owned a television as of 2012. Over a dozen people in Lahore and Karachi told ET recently they had Indian DTH connections — Dish TV, Videocon DTH and Tata Sky being the most commonly available.Pakistani officials said they can’t do much about it. “We are aware that set-top boxes are being smuggled from India and people are getting DTH services illegally,” said a top official at Pakistan’s ministry of information and broadcasting.“We believe there would be around 50,000 to 1-lakh such connections. Our ministry cannot do much to stop the smuggling, that’s something customs needs to look at. But we are working on digitisation of television channels in the country.” Locals peg the number of connections as being significantly higher, mostly concentrated in Lahore and Karachi.Some also said the government has not bothered to crack down on the illegal connections given the strong lobby of those involved in the business. “Initially, the smuggling of set-top boxes used to be through the Wagah border,” a Karachi-based dealer of DTH connections told ET.“We would get people coming from India to carry one or two pieces. But the demand has increased manifold so now the boxes are smuggled in large quantities through the Afghanistan border.”With the sale of LCD and LED television sets rising, there is increasing demand for high-definition (HD) broadcasts, available through Indian DTH services. An annual HD subscription that may cost Rs 7,500 in India costs around 16,000-18 ,000 Pakistan rupees (Rs 9,600-10 ,800) in the Pakistani black market. Dish TV is strict about cracking down on the illegal trade in subscriptions.“We do not encourage any Dish connections going outside the country and have communicated this to all our trade partners, distributors and dealers,” the company said in an email. “Some stray incidents have been reported in the past and we have taken strict action like switching off the connection and issuing penalty or debits to distributors. In some cases, it has even led to cancellation of distributorship of the trade partner concerned.”Orders placed in Pakistan with the local dealer are met through local connections registered under fake names in states such as Rajashthan, Delhi and Bihar.The set-top box is smuggled to Pakistan and installed with a Chinese-made dish antenna on the roof to avoid suspicion and also because sneaking such a bulky item across the border would attract attention.Demand is such that dealers in Pakistan now maintain an inventory and can deliver a set-top box in 24 hours in some cases. Any glitches are sorted out by the dealer.“We don’t allow the customer to get in touch with DTH companies directly ,” said one such DTH trader. “If they have a problem, they call us and we are constantly in touch with India on Skype. We pass on their problem and then the Indian dealers log a local complaint and get the issue resolved . It’s a very smooth process.”