Private channels may have to fund DD, AIR

Private television channels may soon have to loosen their purse strings to fund Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR) if a government committee has its way.

Updated on: Apr 9, 2013, 01:23:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Private television channels may soon have to loosen their purse strings to fund Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR) if a government committee has its way.

The committee to restructure national public broadcaster Prasar Bharati is working on the proposal, which is likely to irk the broadcasting industry.

The committee headed by national innovation council chairman Sam Pitroda believes that DD and AIR have been suffering losses since the entire responsibility of public service broadcasting lies with them. “Private channels are profit-oriented and have no public service obligation,” a government official said.

It wants private channels to pay a ‘public broadcast fee’ to the government, which will be used by DD and AIR to run social benefit programmes.

In the US, private broadcasters are required to provide money for public broadcasting through various methods, such as providing ad slots of 15-30 seconds. The UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) gets its money from licence fee that is levied on radio and television consumers. The Australian Broadcasting Company is government-funded, even though it is an autonomous body.

Star, Zee and Sony networks refused comment but some officials of some other channels agreed to speak off the record “We have public broadcast presented in an interesting manner. It is not boring and typecast as done by DD,” said a private channel official who did not want to be named.

A member of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation said the government cannot force private channels to make Prasar Bharati a viable model. “The public broadcaster has to find its own way to improve revenue,” he said.

The government had constituted Sam Pitroda committee to suggest ways to maintain Prasar Bharati’s autonomous status and have an independent financing mechanism.

Information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari has ruled out the possibility of keeping Prasar Bharati free from government control if his ministry has to foot the bill. “Two-thirds of the I&B ministry's budget — Rs 18.85 billion out of Rs 28 billion — goes to Prasar Bharati. I am the recruiting authority, the disciplinary authority, the sanctioning authority. Yet, I am supposed to have them at arm's length. I am not God," he 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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