Govt Will Regulate Broadcasting Sector

Union information and broadcasting minister S Jaipal Reddy yesterday said the government was committed to regulating broadcast activity in India, including direct-to-home (DTH) services, but not control it.

We would like DTH to come through a proper licensing process, he said, adding, we are totally opposed to control. But we are for regulation.

Speaking at a seminar on the proposed broadcast bill organised in New Delhi by the National Telematics Forum, the minister said the government had an open mind on every provision of the broadcast bill.

He said concerted efforts would be made to evolve a consensus on the sensitive, important and complex bill.

Conceding that it was not a perfect piece of legislation, he said a wild goose chase for a perfect piece of legislation would only result in indefinite postponement of the measure.

Necessary amendments could be carried out at any stage, he said, observing that even the Constitution had undergone 80 significant changes.

Later, the minister told reporters that organisations representing the American and the Indian broadcasters could make representations before the joint parliamentary committee, to which the broadcast bill has been referred. The JPC is slated to meet on June 16-17.

Reddy expressed the hope that the parliamentary committee would complete its task as early as possible and present its report by the first week of the monsoon session of Parliament.

Allaying fears on the government controlling the proposed broadcast authority of India (BAI) through bureaucrats, Reddy said that was not the governments intention. He also denied that he was under pressure to stymie the bill, though ideally he would like the prasar bharati bill to come through first.

Reddy said both the prasar bharati (amendment) bill and the broadcast bill would be operationally delinked. We do not want to create one omnibus body. The functions of both would be qualitatively different, he said.

Defending the governments proposal to constitute a regulatory mechanism, the minister said the plethora of scams that had taken place in the past six years were mainly because of the absence of regulatory mechanisms. However, it had to be ensured that the regulation was limited, he stressed.

Former department of telecommunications secretary N Vittal proposed that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the proposed BAI should be merged, since both involve management of the radio frequency spectrum.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) controls both these sectors in the US and this would provide for an integrated approach to management of telecom and broadcast services because integration is taking place technologically also, he said. Vittal also lashed out at the proposed 20 per cent cross-media restrictions and cross-service restrictions, saying that by doing so we are permanently creating a battalion of pygmies in the media and loosing an opportunity to develop strong Indian media MNCs.

Eminent speakers at one of the sessions questioned the proposed regulatory role of BAI and dwelt on various legal and technical aspects of broadcasting, like frequency allocation and utilisation of present infrastructure.

Urmila Gupta, in charge of the DTH plan of STAR TV, said auctioning of regions to DTH operators would increase the subscription rates for viewers.

Kiran Karnik, chief executive officer of The Discovery Channel, said the broadcast bill should address the issue of plurality and content of the programmes and not the ownership of channels.

Cable Networks Association general secretary Rakesh Dutta accused some MNCs of making concerted attempts to take over and monopolise the cable television industry in India.