Injury on top of insult

Aviation policy is no longer subservient to the commercial interests of the government-owned airlines. Broadcasting policy is yet to make the transition. Cricket telecast contracts are turned upside down by issuing an edict that Doordarshan must get free rights. Parliamentary feeds, especially at Budget time, are made available only to the state broadcaster, who makes a pretty penny for giving the feed to the private channels. Terrestrial television remains a state monopoly (as does short-wave radio).

This might be defensible if Prasar Bharati developed into a genuine public sector broadcasting organisation, instead of being the boring government mouthpiece it has been, dishing out programmes that are an insult to the intelligence of most TV viewers. It is only to be expected therefore that its forays into commercial telecasting have proved unsuccessful; revenues have been erratic, costs are high and the programming generally poor. At a time when private TV channels are global in benchmarking their equipment, set design, telecast quality, programme scheduling and content, Doordarshan is stuck in the stone age. The result, among other things, is an ossified organisation, excess staff most of whom would not find jobs in any other broadcasting organisation, loss of audience share and a long history of losses at a time when private telecasters have been making hay in the same market. No wonder the organisation is a seemingly endless drain on the exchequer.

In short, a great many things are wrong with Doordarshan, and they need to be put right. But, perhaps to no one's surprise, the government has not cared to address any of these longstanding problems; instead, it has started flexing its muscles and exercising sovereign rights in a competitive context. In cricket, this has meant imposing Doordarshan on rival channels and sports bodies. Now the government wants to impose itself on everyone who owns a TV set, by charging an annual licence fee. At one level, it makes sense for the owners of TV sets to pay for programming, rather than it being funded out of tax revenue. At another level, though, it is taking away the rights of TV owners to decide what they will watch and what they will pay for. As for the competitive context, Doordarshan is being given a huge cache of guaranteed revenue, so it will be able to under-cut private sector competitors in the advertising market. It should be noted that while BBC television in the UK gets a similar subvention, it does not take any advertising.

The licence fee quantum is another problem. The reported numbers are an annual fee of Rs 200 for black and white TV sets and Rs 500 for colour TV sets. In comparison, private telecasters get Rs 5 per channel per month (or Rs 60 per year) from each home linked to cable TV's conditional access system. With the current TV population, the revenue from the licence fees proposed will give Doordarshan an annual kitty of well over Rs 2,000 crore, plus advertising revenue. If the country got some halfway decent programming in return for this, people may not have minded being arm-twisted into paying up. But given what is dished out, it is adding injury to insult.