Your idiot box to get 75 more channels

Indian entertainment is set to get bigger with the Information and Broadcasting ministry approving 75 new channels aimed at attracting children and youth. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 22, 2011, 01:48:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indian entertainment is set to get bigger with the Information and Broadcasting ministry approving 75 new channels aimed at attracting children and youth.

The big leap for the TV industry has come for the first time after 2009 when the ministry imposed a moratorium on allowing new channels on the ground of reviewing working of the existing channels.

Over 20 crore people in India watch over 600 channels available through different platforms such as cable network, Direct To Home, Internet Protocol Television and the recent advent mobile television.

Such was the impact of the moratorium, that the ministry received over 150 applications during the interim two years and many of them were from leading companies seeking permission to start new channels and replicate the existing one in High Definition.

This month, the ministry approved a bouquet of channels by companies such as Discovery, ESPN, FOX, Zee Entertainment, UTV Entertainment and Star Network.

Aimed at young population, Discovery — most watched English channel in India, will come up with five new channels — Discovery Kids, Investigation Discovery, Home and Health, 3D Net and Military.

Fox will have new additions with Nat Geo Adventure and Nat Geo Wild. ESPN will now have Star Cricket on High Definition. Both UTV and Zee will increase its base in the area of entertainment with number of regional channels.

Once all these channels become operational, the number of channels available to Indian audience will touch 700, among highest in the world. “The number is high because of diversity in our culture and increasing popularity of some of the foreign channels,” a ministry official 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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