Big brother to watch your TV

Now, big brother to watch your TV, 24X7

Published on: Sep 4, 2006, 03:49:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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From January next year, a specialist cell will keep a hawk-eyed vigil on what is beamed into your homes — from news capsules to smutty videos — 24 hours a day.

The watchdogs: the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre, which the government will soon set up.

The decision shows that the government is determined to push ahead its plan to monitor television content despite the fact that the debate over the “draconian” Broadcasting Bill is yet to be settled.

The monitoring cell is, in fact, intended to give more teeth to the proposed Broadcasting Regulatory Authority. The centre will monitor all the channels beamed into India, including foreign channels, and will maintain records of the content which violate different broadcasting rules.

“The monitoring unit is being put in place so that channels adhere to the advertising and the programme code as notified under the Cable Network (Regulation) Act, 1995 or the new content code proposed under the new Broadcast Bill,” said a ministry official.

At a later stage, the government might even monitor content on India beamed to foreign countries. “The monitoring will be done to keep the government abreast with how India is being projected in the outside world,” an official explained.

The decision has its origin in a letter written by home secretary V.K. Duggal to his counterpart in the information and broadcasting ministry S.K. Arora in April this year, complaining about some news channels “sensationalizing” incidents of terrorism and riots. He had requested the ministry to bring in a monitoring mechanism for television channels.

Now, the ministry is dependent only on complaints from citizens to take action against the channels. Now, it can take suo moto action on basis of the information provided by the centre, an 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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