Prasar Bharati caught in turf war

The functioning of the Prasar Bharati Board, which controls public broadcasters Doordarshan and All India Radio, is at a standstill these days as the board members are caught in a turf war on the issue of curtailing Chief Executive Officer BS Lalli’s powers, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 4, 2009, 01:12:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The functioning of the Prasar Bharati Board, which controls public broadcasters Doordarshan and All India Radio, is at a standstill these days as the board members are caught in a turf war on the issue of curtailing Chief Executive Officer BS Lalli’s powers.

The minutes of the board meeting, held on March 23, revealed about the unrest. A note accusing Lalli of arbitrarily running the organisation flouting government rules was approved at the meeting with seven members voicing in its favour and three against it.

The differences between the two groups headed by Prasar Bharati chairman Arun Bhatnagar and CEO Lalli resulted in no other issue being discussed at the meeting except the endorsement of the appointment of Aruna Sharma as Director-General, Doordarshan.

“In the entire meeting, questions were being raised over certain decisions made by the CEO regarding the Commonwealth Games,” a board member told Hindustan Times.

In the note adopted by the board, the six members have asked Bhatnagar to convene a special meeting to discuss the implementation of a project on the coverage of the Commonwealth Games as the project was violating rules and had several financial irregularities.

They have also alleged that minutes of the February board meeting, in which allegations were levelled against Lalli, circulated by Office on Special Duty D Malvey were illegal. They have added that the minutes circulated by Bhatnagar has been confirmed.

Lalli in his defence had said the powers had been delegated to the CEO through a board resolution adopted in 1997 and said the note against him was in violation of the Prasar Bharati Act. However, Lalli could not be contacted for his comment nor did he respond to a questionnaire send by HT on the board meeting.

The six members, who circulated the note, has asked the board to delegate the CEO’s financial powers to member (Finance) AK Jain and his control over Prasar Bharati secretariat should vest with member (personnel) V Shivkumar.

“The chairman has been asked to notify the delegation of the powers to the members to ensure that the board functions in a transparent manner,” a member, who was not willing to be quoted, said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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