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Magazine
Tracking the real India
SEVANTI NINAN
The news today is about real issues and ordinary people ... the water problem for instance.
TV news is crime, celebrity and sensation-driven, and predominantly urban. It ignores the little people and focuses on newsmakers. Right? Not entirely. If you watch more closely it is clear that some of the standard criticisms made about the news media no longer hold good. With the profusion of 24-hour news channels and news bulletins on regional channels, India that is Bharat is being covered like never before.
For some years now, righteous critics (this writer included) have been crying themselves hoarse over how insensitive the news media has become in a poor country, how unconcerned about real issues which affect ordinary people. But take a look at what news channels carry these days on a daily basis and a few things become clear. Reporters and camerapersons are going out into the countryside much more than they used to. They are bringing ordinary people going about their daily lives into the news net.
Water shortages, daily frustrations of dealing with the government, poor educational facilities, all this and more are getting covered from more destinations than ever before.
One morning last week, just flipping across channels, one came across the following stories. Star News was looking at the plight of Pardhis in Baramati district, how they are regularly arrested and their women harassed. On NDTV 24x7 there was a story about a horticulture farmer driven to suicide in Amravati over the lack of water for his orange trees.
Water-intensive cropping had severely affected water availability here, the story said.
Headlines Today was profiling a Catholic priest from Tripura who had won an award at a film festival in Poland for a film he had made on witch-hunts in his region, using local actors. At about the same time, ETV news was doing a story on a rehabilitation centre for former insurgents in Tripura. "Pulse polio" day being observed in the districts of Bihar was also generously covered. Some other channel was looking at how the Prime Minister 's national highway project was affecting villages in the Chandoli district of Uttar Pradesh because a bypass that was being constructed was swallowing up their land.
On Doordarshan, a correspondent from Arunachal Pradesh was reporting on how a remote, high altitude village, surrounded on three sides by Myanmar depends on the Indian Air Force to ferry them supplies of rice, dal, and kerosene on a daily basis. Meanwhile NDTV India and other channels carried stories about three elephants which died in the Dudhwa National Park when they were hit by a train. A rail line runs through the sanctuary. There was some heavy editorialising from reporter Kamal Khan who took off on a comparison between the fate of political elephants and ordinary ones. The Bahujan Samaj Party's election symbol is an elephant.
Later in the day the same channel had a story from Chattisgarh on a school where every single student had failed the board exam for lack of teachers. The class eight teacher had taught the students of class 10, and students of both classes had ended up failing. Next morning there was another crop of stories which news people categorise as offbeat. Zee News was looking at the plight of a Gandhinagar widow whose pension had been led up because the government decided to change the system of disbursal which gave pensions to one lakh widows here.
Then the channel went off to Jodhpur to look at a school where young girls are being given religious education and are being taught the Vedas so that they can later become pundits and breach a predominantly male bastion. Then came another story on filaria spreading in Nanded district. Meanwhile Aaj Tak was profiling a family of a prisoner of war which was hoping the current thaw in Indo-Pakistan relations would result in their father coming home. This was from Jammu. There was also a follow up on the Dudhwa National Park story, a demand for the removal of the rail line from the park.
Moving across channels one found many more stories. One on a village in Singbhum from where ancient idols had been stolen. Another was on a bootlegging community in Jammu which was forced to continue in this profession and led harassed lives. ETV Bihar which features a round of district news every day was doing a follow up on trains in the State affected by the Magadh Express derailment. There was a report from Deogarh in Bihar on the plight of a traditional medicine clinic which had no medicines, and another from Jahanabad on the zilla parishad elections held there.
News staffing patterns are changing both in newspapers and TV channels as the media strive to localise to win readers and viewers in the hinterland of major towns, and in rural areas. The Hindustan, Bihar's leading Hindi daily, employs a thousand stringers to bring in loads of news which would not have been considered news in another era.
And Sun News in the South has a district network of 140 stringers to bring district news to its viewers. Cable operators add to the local news penetration. One district town has three cable operators giving news three times a day, on local schools, the local administration, and local political parties.
The news then is often more about real people and real issues than we are used to giving it credit for.
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