Commentary/Vir Sanghvi

The government should not waste its time (and our money) setting up a media empire

A year or so later, DD3 was revived but by then it had lost its great advantage. It no longer helped to be terrestrial because upper middle class households -- the target audience -- had installed cable connections. Even if you were available to those who only had aerials, this was no good because most people didn't use their aerials. They depended on their cable operators to decide what they would watch.

And most cable operators decided they didn't want it. DD helped by putting the channel on a satellite band (in addition to the terrestrial transmission) that was hard to receive and by getting the programming mix wrong. Though bands have now been changed and the programmes reworked, the channel remains little watched.

And all of Doordarshan's worst fears have come true. Satellite channels do set the agenda. Doordarshan may have the numbers but decision-makers ignore it. To add insult to injury, STAR Plus is now doing what Doordarshan intended and its head, R Basu, even says proudly, 'Our concept is the same as the one we originally had for DD3.'

Even by Doordarshan's dismal standards, the DD3 saga represents a foul-up of unparalleled magnitude.

I remind you of all this because there is, at last, some hope for DD3. In the fuss over the Broadcasting Bill, everyone has ignored Chand Mahal Ibrahim's announcement that he will float a global tender and hand DD3 over to a private party.

Ibrahim is still talking about retaining 51 per cent of the equity but he wants the channel to be managed by the private sector. The private partner can put on its own programming, install its own transmitters, staff it with its own people -- and still have the rights to terrestrial broadcasting.

The principle is clear -- privatise Doordarshan. Allow the private sector to run a channel with the programming values of Zee TV or STAR Plus but with the reach of Doordarshan.

This flows directly from the Supreme Court judgment of 1994 (the ostensible provocation for the Broadcasting Bill) which seeks to end the government's monopoly of the airwaves. While the draft Broadcasting Bill wastes too much time trying to control the satellite channels, it does make some tentative movement towards privatisation.

Sadly, it does not go far enough. There is no justification, for instance, for government control of the Metro channel. Doordarshan makes none of the programming on that channel but merely functions as a leaser of time for private producers. Why keep up the fiction that it is a Doordarshan channel when it has ceased to be that in any significant sense?

The privatisation of DD3 is only a beginning. It must be followed on the rest of the network. Every democratic country has private terrestrial broadcasters. They are free, but subject to a regulatory mechanism.

India should follow the global precedents. We can go with the American pattern where the Federal Communications Commission gives license to several terrestrial channels. Or we can follow the British example and institute a system whereby the Independent Broadcasting Authority awards franchises on a territorial basis.

Regardless of which model we finally select, we must accept that the government has no business running anything more than one public service channel -- DD1. It should not waste its time (and our money) setting up a media empire. And as the DD3 example shows us, even when it has the right ideas, there are so many pressures and vested interests that golden opportunities are certain to be missed.

Despite Ibrahim's announcement that he will break with precedent, the political establishment remains notably silent. Even we in the media have been sidetracked by the Broadcasting Bill's restrictions on satellite channels. We have failed to see that while it is important to have free satellite broadcasting, it is much more important to privatise Doordarshan.

It is up to the media to extract a commitment from all political parties to the privatisation of DD3. We must also push for a longer term commitment towards a system of privately-owned terrestrial broadcasting channels.

Otherwise, Doordarshan will remain our sole terrestrial broadcaster, always boring, usually inept and only too willing to be abused by the likes of P V R K Prasad and Narasimha Rao.

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