Hawking tele-time

IN January 1993 Doordarshan began the Metro channel as a Republic Day gift to the nation. Star TV and BBC had begun winning viewers since September 1991, and three months prior to the advent of Metro, Zee TV had made its debut. The heat of competition was being felt for the first time since Doordarshan was carved out of All India Radio in 1976.

Eight and a half years down the line, the same satellite channel competition is being cordially invited to come and take the best prime time slots on the Metro Channel. This is the most eloquent admission of failure yet on the part of the Government to run its public broadcaster effectively.

In the last two weeks I have heard Sushma Swaraj make two almost identical speeches about the need to project the right values through television, and to package progressive messages into television fiction. Yet she is now presiding over the auctioning of a five and a half hour band from 7 p.m., on Doordarshan's second terrestrial channel. The telecast time will go to the highest bidder.

How do you project values, indeed control content, when you are hawking telecast time? Said the Minister when asked, "Well, they will have to follow our programme code." Indeed they do, and a much-touted new serial on the currently rented out time band is about two women who are best buddies and both married to the same man without knowing it. There's progressive fiction for you.

This the second year running in which time is being auctioned on the Metro channel. To understand the bizarreness of this decision you have to read under a head called "Significant activities during 2000-2001", in the latest annual report of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It says 41 transmitters were commissioned in the course of the year for the Metro channel, 22 of them high-powered. Why does the Government continue to augment a network it is no longer interested in using for its own purpose?

In 2001-2002, Prasar Bharati (PB) has a budget estimate of Rs. 2,000 crores, including the commercial earnings of radio and TV. The exchequer pays up that kind of money to give the Government a medium through which it can reach the billion people it is supposed to govern. And then we are told that the 20,000 plus people employed by Prasar Bharati do not have the capability of providing programmes on its network, so it rents out time on the network, at the time of the day that it is most watched, to its rival channels.

The floor price is less than Rs. 120 crores for four hours a day in the prime time band, for three years, no less. With 10 per cent annual increase, per slot, per year. This year's floor price is drastically reduced from the Rs. 121 crores PB got for the duration of three hours for a single year, in last year's auction.

This is only one part of a unique disinvestment of broadcasting capability that is going on. The PB Corporation is also looking at whether it can lease out its radio transmitters to private parties, even as it expands its transmission network. It currently has at least six new FM transmitters that have not been commissioned as yet because there are no programmes to put on it. In Calcutta, Yuvavani has been shifted to FM just to be able to make use of a transmitter that is available. Commissioning more and more transmitters costs money. You are hard up for money. Then why keep commissioning them and then talk of leasing them to private competition?

These are analog transmitters. PB is also building digital terrestrial TV transmitters (DTTs) in four metropolitan cities in the hope that private channels will come forward to lease the extra transmission capacity in these transmitters. DTTs are an expensive proposition, and eventually you will need hundreds of them to cover the whole country. Despite overtures from PB, private channels have so far refused to bite. It simply does not make economic sense for them to have a digital terrestrial network. Is this going to be another white elephant in the making?

PB in its entirety is a white elephant that costs a bomb to maintain. It could be drastically pared and focussed, and then fully subsidised so that its purpose would not be diluted. But when such hard solutions are proposed, they are quickly side- stepped. Over the last year two government committees have recommended drastic pruning of both PB and other wings of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. The Shunu Sen Committee suggested scrapping of the Indian Broadcasting Service, putting producers on contract, and reducing PB's engineering force by 75 per cent.

In the year 2001 the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the Government of India finds itself in a piquant position. Its role is slipping away from it. It was a regulatory ministry. Its job was to censor films, and do broadcasting and cable regulation. But with the advent of convergence, future regulatory authority is more likely to be with the telecom and information technology ministries. The media council may never come because the broadcasting industry does not want such regulation.

Ms Swaraj is now trying to give the ministry an economic purpose. Hence the conversion of parts of PB into leasing agencies. Having given the film sector industry status, Ms Swaraj is very keen to build up film exports and such like. One reason for haring off to Cannes with some six or seven officials in tow was to sell India as a destination for the Western film industry, another was to promote export of Indian films. After the experience Deepa Mehta had with "Water", trying to sell India as a film shooting destination to the West is a bit of a joke.

And as for exports, the big Bombay producers slated to accompany her on this trip backed out. They know where their market is, and it is not in Europe. The kind of films the Europeans would want, portraying poverty and exploitation, are the kind of films that Ms Swaraj would not want to sell to them. And where the Bombay producers have a market, in South East Asia and in the Middle East, they do not need the help of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to sell.

She is seeking a raison d'etre for her ministry. Increasingly, it does not have one. The Geetakrishnan committee has recommended the scrapping of the Field Publicity Division which employs 1,900 people, the scrapping of the Song and Drama division which has a budget of Rs. 16 crores and employs 241 people, a drastic paring down of the Films Division, the Publications Division, and the Press Information Bureau.

The Metro Channel auction then is a manifestation of a much larger, unresolved, dilemma for this ministry: to be or not to be?

Covering Nepal: The dramatic events in Nepal underscored one thing: while TV channels are good at covering breaking news, they have no talent for breaking any news themselves. Till Saturday night none of the Indian TV channels had ferreted out any of the news angles that newspapers had in plenty the next morning. None of them even mentioned Devyani. All they had to offer was repetitive footage, and the same experts going from studio to studio. This trend continued through the next few days: if you got anything new it was from the newspapers, notably the Asian Age.

It is not difficult to see why Indian satellite TV coverage irked the Nepalis. Apart from the ignorance on display, the tone was often patronising, and downright insensitive. At one point one saw the "Aaj Tak" correspondent compare the story of the royal family in Nepal to the plot of a Hindi film. TV anchors abroad have been sacked for less.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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