Ban On Foreign Print Media Is Outdated

First, lets turn to the Asian Age. Why, what a wealth of information from foreign sources! I can read Anne McElvoy of the Spectator with the latest inside stuff on the new Blair government, or the agonies of the Conservative Party. If I want to see a bit of flesh, there are always plenty of pictures of scantily-clad foreign ladies. And after that, if I feel a little faint, I can turn in the same newspaper to the New York Times health page.

For cricket news, I can open the Statesman for the sage views of Alan Lee, cricket correspondent of the Times of London. And as for business, theres the Indian Express and the Financial Express with plenty of copy from the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Business Standard with its input from the Financial Times.

 

And if all that is not enough, plenty of other Indian newspapers have syndication agreements with foreign publishers, as well as their subscriptions to Reuters, Agence France Presse, Associated Press. The reader of Indian newspapers can never go hungry for stories written by foreigners. And in the magazine world, a full dose of foreign culture, adapted for Indian tastes, is available to women in the form of Cosmopolitan magazine.

The funny thing about all these arrangements is that they involve Indian money being paid to foreign publishers what used to be called scarce foreign exchange. The foreign publisher is unworried about whether the copy he is selling to India is actually of interest to Indian readers. His only concern is that the Indian customer pays up.

The 42-year-old ban on foreign investment in the Indian print media prevents the foreign publisher from having any of his own money at risk in India. Hence the large number of agreements which involve Indian publications making payments abroad. Can this have been what Nehru intended when he banned the foreign media from India ?

This anomalous situation does not apply to television, which is, as most people would agree, a far more potent medium (but one which did not exist when Nehru made his ruling.)

Flick through the channels and you can see Cable News Network and the BBC churning out news and information, almost entirely written by foreigners, twenty-four hours a day. There are endless hours of American basketball and even female wrestling. Foreign soaps, movies and cartoons abound, as well as sexually suggestive pop music videos.

These programmes are mostly being broadcast in India by companies which are either foreign or have foreign partners. The difference is that the foreigners have actually invested money in India. Mr Rupert Murdochs Star network and many other foreign television companies have poured significant amounts of cash into India in their effort to develop what could be a massive television market.

Most of the foreign-invested companies are developing services in Indian languages  something at which the Indian newspaper industry has always thrown up its hands in pious horror. I wonder whether those who react in this way watch Baywatch in Hindi (Star), BBC news in Hindi (Home TV), Cricket commentary in Hindi (Star and ESPN), or news in a mixture of Hindi and English (Zee).

There is a further range of foreign-owned channels which tailor may of their programmes specifically for India, such as ABNI, in which Dow Jones has an investment, and MTV.

Nor is foreign culture the exclusive domain of the private sector. Remember Doordarshans agreement with CNN? Another state-controlled company, VSNL, is doing a thriving business in selling subscriptions to the Internet - the widest window on global activity, both savoury and unsavoury, ever invented.

The vast range of foreign news and culture which is now available to Indians underlines a number of points.

First, government attempts to control the flow of information and foreign culture by imposing barriers on media ownership simply do not work, especially given advances in technology.

Second, Indians appear to be absorbing the cultural pollution without losing their strong sense of identity and nationhood. Government controls on the media often overlook the fact that the people themselves have the ultimate sanction: if they do not like what they see, they can switch channels or even switch off the television, or they can stop taking one newspaper and take another. If they do this, the broadcaster or publisher will lose adver- tising revenue.

Third, foreign companies find that, to be commercially successful, they have to produce material which is designed to please a local audience. Global broadcasting has only a limited appeal. So programmes produced with foreign capital for India are likely to have more and more Indian content.

If foreigners want to make money out of Indian television viewers, it is surely right that they put some of their own money at risk. Should not the same principle apply to the newspaper industry ? If an Indian newspaper wants to take the help of a foreign partner so that it can develop into a world class Indian product, should the investment of money not be allowed to be a part of that help ?

(The author is a Financial Times Journalist who has just completed an assignment as Consulting Editor of Business Standard. The views he expresses here are personal.)