Popularity of Radio

A great deal of the credit for radio's high appeal must go to the BBC, writes Pavan K Varma.

Do you listen to radio more than you watch television? I am tempted to ask this because I suspect I will get two very different answers from an Indian and an Englishman. In India television, although a much later entrant, reigns supreme. In the UK radio has held its own in spite of the formidable challenge posed by television.

I did not quite realise how fundamental this difference is until my book 'Being Indian: Inside the Real India' was launched last week in London by William Heinemann. I have been in and out of radio studios since then, and quite taken aback at the size of the audience.

In India radio is television's poor cousin, an also ran, that tries valiantly to retain its listeners, but accepts that the visual medium is much more powerful. In the UK it is my distinct impression that as many, if not more, people listen to radio than watch television. In fact, I have met some people who say that they only listen to radio and never watch television.

A great deal of the credit for radio's high appeal here must go to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC is very much into television, but it has not neglected its radio operations. In many parts of the world, BBC news on radio is coterminous with accurate and objective reporting, and a foil to the doctored news often purveyed by local stations. Listening to BBC radio is a global habit. Sir Mark Tully, the BBC's man in Delhi for decades, once told me that he has been welcomed in the most remote villages of India as the man who gives believable news on the radio every day.

All India Radio, or Akashwani as it is called in Hindi, began in 1947 with six stations and eighteen transmitters, covering less than 3 per cent of the people and 11 per cent of territory. It grew over the decades to broadcast in 24 languages and 146 dialects from over 200 broadcasting centres reaching almost all our billion people. However, popular film music is the mainstay of Indian radio. Even the more recent private FM stations, although zanier in their presentations, rely almost wholly on Bollywood.

Television was hitched to satellite technology in 1975 to further the cause of 'social education'. Today, Doordarshan, the state telecaster, operates 23 channels, including 12 in regional languages. The real revolution was, of course, the advent of cable television in the early 1990s. Today cable television offers seventy channels, and thanks to its hugely popular sitcoms has devoted followers in over 40 million homes. An estimated 70 million TV sets are installed in rural India. According to one survey, the state of Uttar Pradesh has only two million toilets but 6.4 million televisions!

As elsewhere, in India too radio preceded television. Radio's reach is probably wider than television's, and presumably more people own radios than televisions, especially in India since the transistor is so much cheaper than the idiot box. Why then has the radio revolution bypassed India? Why does radio have such a high and committed following in countries like the UK, and much less so in India? Is it only because commuting is a national pastime in Britain, and radio is the best companion for the commuter? Will radio recover lost ground once, thanks to our upcoming metros and burgeoning satellite towns, commuting becomes mainstream activity in India too?

I hope so. But for this to happen radio must improve its content, and get more professional and committed presenters whose orbit of knowledge goes beyond Bollywood and whose talents are not restricted only to wise cracks and rhetoric.

(A Stephanian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)