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'Lawless cable television market cause for monopolistic tendencies and worse'

Our Correspondent in Bombay

Operators of cable television networks all over the country have expressed concern over the killing of two of their associates this fortnight and sought to draw the attention of the prime minister and the home minister to the entry of crime into the sunrise industry.

Last week, executive director of InCablenet, Ram Panjabi, was shot dead in Bombay. On Tuesday evening, resident regional director (south) of SitiCable, P Ramakrishna, was killed in a similar fashion in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.

The police are yet to establish motives for the murders. No major breakthroughs have been made. Markets sources alleged that business rivalry may be the cause.

In New Delhi, the Cable Operators Federation of India said in a statement that it had requested central and state governments to intervene and put an end to this highly dangerous trend of wanton killing of innocent people from the industry.

COFI president Roop Sharma has asked Prime Minister A B Vajpayee and Home Minister L K Advani in separate representations to order a high-level inquiry to probe these murders and said the cable and satellite television industry had been criminalised in the absence of proper regulations. She said the greed for monopolisation in a lawless environment gave rise to criminalisation.

InCablenet and SitiCable are the two most prominent corporate players in the ground distribution segment of the satellite television sector in India. While the former is owned by the Hindujas-led IndusInd Media and Communications, the latter is a joint venture between Subhash Chandra's Zee TV group and Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV group.

In a related but unconnected development, the World Communication Report, brought out by UNESCO has revealed that despite making rapid technological advances, India is still ranked as one of the most under-equipped countries in the developing world in the audio-visual market.

''With an indigenous population of 900 million, India would be the second largest audio-visual market in the world if the purchasing power of its population were proportional to its demographic scale,'' the report notes.

In an exclusive chapter on India, the report said there are some 46 million television sets in the country and less than ten per cent households have a video cassette recorder. ''Basically, it is the 200 million middle-class Indians who have an individual colour television set.''

The same classes, it said, are also hastening to buy cable television equipment and dish antennae.

Quoting estimates, the report said there were 16 million homes with cable television in 1996 and 7.3. million satellite dishes in 1994. The massive presence of community television sets in 600,000 rural villages gives a much larger audience access to television, even if 75 per cent of the sets are black and white and can retrieve only seven to eight channels.

The report said the Indian audio-visual landscape has for many years been dominated by the government-controlled national terrestrial and satellite network Doordarshan. The Indian public network reaches 85 per cent of the Indian population and covers two-thirds of the territory.

The report said that with the arrival of private channels in 1993, the public network has diversified to set up six other terrestrial channels specialising in regional and national programmes.

The report observed that the opening of the Indian audio-visual market has been conditioned to a large degree by the anarchic proliferation of cable and satellite television. Cut-throat competition for market-shares, viewership and advertising and subscription revenues ensued, followed by squabbles between pay-channels and ground distributors. The number of households with cable television rapidly rose from 0.4 million to 16 million between 1993 and 1996.

The report said that in 1995, the cable television network comprised 28 channels broadcasting among others CNN International, Canal France International, Asian Television Network, Sun TV, MTV and above all STAR TV and Zee TV.

Faced with this multitude of channels, a draft bill on broadcasting, issued in 1997, placed a 49 per cent limit on foreign investment in an Indian television service. The new procedure of granting licences provides a separate accord for each type of service, depending on the broadcasting system being employed:terrestrial broadcasting, satellite, cable or direct satellite.

The report said that until such time as the bill is passed in Parliament, the Indian government steadfastly refuses to legalise the Murdoch package. In recent years, political decision-makers have earnestly discussed the position of international channels: some of them are of the opinion that the incursion of cable or satellite channels may well compromise the role of television as a factor of social and material unity.

Additional reportage: UNI