Taken together, cable and satellite television channels now reach 57 per cent of all people owning television sets. Doordarshan reaches 100 per cent of them, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The I&B ministry’s bid to curb the freedom of expression of private news channels through changes in the Cable Television Regulation Rules, is a clear admission that, for all its trumpeted reach, state owned Doordarshan cannot really match the private channels’ influence.
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Or else why not use Doordarshan to counter the private channels’ alleged excesses?
Taken together, cable and satellite television channels now reach 57 per cent of all people owning television sets. Doordarshan reaches 100 per cent of them. But the problem is that those who get private channels do not care to watch Doordarshan at all.
It is testimony to the decline of Doordarshan’s quality – the same channel that provided trail blazing serials like Tamas and Bharat Ek Khoj in the 1980s. While private broadcasters have consistently tried to innovate, all Doordarshan does is belatedly copy them.
“Quality has been the biggest casualty at Doordarshan,” said a senior television producer.
Doordarshan employees primarily blame government interference. Doordarshan is an autonomous institution only on paper. “We have to cover and broadcast all government functions, however boring, which private channels don’t have to,” said a senior Doordarshan official, requesting anonymity. “How can we compete when there is no level playing field?”
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The government would do well to try and improve Doordarshan, on which it spends around Rs 900 crore each year, instead of trying to control its privately owned competitors.
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The government would do well to try and improve Doordarshan, on which it spends around Rs 900 crore each year, instead of trying to control its privately owned competitors.
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“We have a lot of talented young people who can wonders for the institution,” said, B S Lalli, Chief Executive Officer of Prasar Bharati Corporation, which runs Doordarshan and All India Radio.
Private news channels do go overboard at times. Self-restraint by the channels too is not as easily enforced as it sounds. Only 31 of the country 197 news channels have joined the News Broadcasters’ Association, that has notified a code of self regulation.
But if Doordarshan had provided a model alternative, self regulation could have more easily achieved.
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.
