Over the last ten years, the South Asia region has undergone a media revolution. The hegemony of the state sector has been overthrown and the viewing public in large towns has been given a choice of up to seventy new satellite television channels for as little as four dollars a month. This revolution has been most dramatic in India, the worlds largest democracy.
Indias large and expanding middle class is proving an irresistible target for international business whose advertising expenditure is driving this rapid media expansion. Thanks largely to satellite expansion, the last decade has seen a hugely increased choice for the Indian viewing public who have enthusiastically welcomed the greater diversity. But recent signs are that this diversity is narrowing media ownership is becoming concentrated in the hands of a few big conglomerates, programme content remains limited, and Doordarshan, Indians public service broadcaster, in trying to compete with these new providers is failing to meet its public service remit.
Few have lamented the breaking of the states stranglehold on broadcasting. It has brought a new dynamism to the Indian media frame with increased viewer choice, better entertainment, a broader international perspective, more credible news reporting and a greater sense of inclusiveness. However, this satellite expansion has been almost completely unregulated. The market has been left to run itself, while public service broadcasting remains under centralised bureaucratic government control. India and the choices it now makes regarding its media policy and the future of its public service institutions will serve as an example, perhaps as a warning, for all democracies wishing to balance the needs of the market with the interests of civil society.
A surrender to the market?
The recent history of Indias public service provider, Doordarshan, graphically illustrates the issues at stake in the debate between Andrew Graham and David Elstein, in the first pilot issue of openDemocracy. Historically, Doordarshan has been under the direct control of government. It has been used by successive regimes to impose their own political will and suppress the voice of their opponents. Doordarshans news and current events broadcasting has been tarnished by this overt government control and is widely perceived to be partial. The end of thirty years of uninterrupted Congress Party rule in 1977 brought a promise of autonomy but the process was grindingly slow. It took twenty years to establish the requisite institutions. Even then the systems designed to ensure Doordarshans independence have proved fragile and ineffective. Real control of public service broadcasting remains in the hands of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Since 1992, Doordarshan has been obliged to seek eighty per cent of its operating costs from advertising, placing it in direct competition with the proliferating satellites and cable stations. This has led to a relentless pursuit of the middle class audience, the main target of the advertisers, a westernisation of content, a narrowing of programme diversity, and a tendency to rely on the lowest common denominator in state and commercial broadcasting alike.
In structure, Doordarshan suffers from the kind of bureaucratic inefficiency and government interference that David Elstein implies is endemic in state funded institutions. At the same time, its need to compete for advertising revenue has meant that it is failing to deliver the educational, informational and culturally diverse programming which is the justification for state-funded media services. Doordarshan, in fact, is mimicking the unregulated satellite sector, which is increasingly dominated by a few big media players like Rupert Murdochs Star, Subhash Chandras Zee TV, or Sony. In terms of the public interest, current Indian media policy is in effect a surrender to the market.
State Control of PSB
Since its inception, Indian public service broadcasting has modelled itself closely on Britains BBC. In the 1930s, All India Radio was set up by a BBC broadcaster, Lionel Fielden. The BBC model was valued for its strong centralisation, which helped consolidate the power of the Viceroy and colonial authority. The exigencies of war only increased this centralising trend. Post-independence governments did nothing in the way of decentralisation or diversification. Generations of politicians used the state broadcaster for party purposes and the public lost faith in its independence. State broadcasters have produced some good and popular programmes, but have long been too subservient to government to be regarded as adequate pillars of civil society.
In practice, neither of Indias largest parties, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Congress party, seems genuinely committed to autonomy. When the first of a series of United Front governments ended the Congress Partys long political reign in 1977, it pressed for autonomy for Doordarshan, setting up a committee to establish the ground rules. But it was too unstable to survive for long and the momentum was lost.
It took a full twenty years for Prasar Bharati, the notionally autonomous broadcasting institution, to be established. Even then any pretence to independence was short-lived. With the BJP in power in New Delhi, the devolved powers have been successfully clawed back by the Ministry of Information. Prasar Bharatis chief executive was forced to quit his post. And the Board of Governors has ceased to wield any influence.
While the BBC and other European broadcasters began to face commercial competition from the 1950s onwards, in South Asia governments maintained their monopolies into the 1990s, despite the growing freedom of the national press. In India, no terrestrial television stations have been licensed to compete with Doordarshan at national or state level. Diversification has only happened in FM radio licensing, but the auctioning of the radio airwaves has followed a strictly economic rationale, where as many as 12 stations have been licensed in some cities, with no regulatory framework to ensure programme diversity. These stations are prohibited from broadcasting news or current affairs programmes, despite the growth of news services on satellite TV.
Diversification in television has come about in the last decade due to the proliferation of satellite broadcasting. The major players in the region have been Star TV, the Asian arm of Rupert Murdochs giant News Corporation; Zee TV, run by Indian entrepreneur Subhash Chandra; and a later entry, Sony, with the full resources of its electronics and media production empire behind it. Transmitting a diet of programmes largely adapted from western entertainment formats soap operas, quizzes, pop video and variety shows as well 24 hour news, these satellite services have been welcomed as alternatives to Indias state-controlled broadcasting. The benefits have been considerable. However, without an adequate regulatory framework, the market has the upper hand. Meanwhile, the very existence of so many channels is being used, by both the BJP and the Congress, to argue against increased autonomy for Doordarshan.
Indias two most prominent political parties argue that the need for competition and balance one of the central planks of the autonomy argument is already being met by the satellite broadcasters. They say that in the new media market, Government needs a voice of its own, given its very extensive responsibilities to the population as a whole. However, this argument would be more persuasive if the government were not forcing its own media down the road of commercial competition. In 1992, the government cut Doordarshans state subsidy from eighty to twenty per cent of the operating budget, obliging it to make up the rest with advertising revenue. Doordarshans response masterminded by executives drawn from the senior civil service was to maximise its appeal to the new middle class, sideline its own staff, and try to compete with satellite on its own turf through an increase in entertainment such as soap operas and game-shows. The inevitable results were staff demoralisation and a squeezing out of commercially less viable programming.
Diversity and audience needs
As Doordarshans content has changed in response to this new competition with commercial broadcasters, so some of the basic requirements of public service Andrew Grahams concept of public merit goods have fallen by the wayside. It is ironic, however, that in the reflection of Indias cultural diversity, some of the satellite channels currently have a stronger claim to success than Doordarshan. Particularly in the South, and more recently elsewhere, satellite channels are providing space for regional cultures on a far greater scale than the national broadcaster.
Recent research suggests a mixed reaction amongst consumers to the new channels. While welcoming the increased choice, they express concerns about the narrowness of programme range and the intrusiveness of advertising, as well as around issues of taste and decency. Somewhat surprisingly, despite long years of tight state control, there still seems to be a constituency for the state sector if it could improve its performance.
The expansion of satellite broadcasting has brought undoubted advantages extended choice, news reporting independent of government (if not of commercial political interests), and higher quality entertainment programming. The success of Star TVs 24-hour news, for example, could be used to suggest, as Elstein does, that the way forward is to devolve public service responsibilities onto the satellite broadcasters, in exchange for government concessions. Some channels like Zee and Sony have not ruled this out, but have expressed the need for an adequate and fair regulatory frame as a prerequisite.
The issue of cultural invasiveness raised by satellite penetration into Indian territory is an extremely sensitive one. Recently, New Delhi favoured Doordarshans claims on the new Direct to Home Transmissions technology, ahead of Rupert Murdochs, on the basis of the dangers of cultural imperialism inherent in such technology. Similarly, French channel Fashion TV have been told to make their programmes more suitable for Indian audiences.
But there are significant difficulties in regulating the satellite media. Many satellite channels are currently beyond the reach of the Indian state, uplinking from Singapore or Hong Kong. The Indian government has attempted to establish control by requiring satellite companies to incorporate in India if they wish to uplink from Indian territory a considerable advantage for news channels but on terms which are far too restrictive for the majority of channel owners.
Centralisation and Consolidation
In the new multi-channel universe, media legislation and control remain the prerogative of the national government and resistance to decentralisation remains strong. Indian states with responsibility for tens of millions of citizens have no say in the matter. With legislation to deal with the convergence of technologies under consideration, and telecommunication and communications likely to be brought under the control of the same ministry in the near future, centralisation is actually increasing.
In the satellite and cable fields which have mushroomed in the past decade, the trend is toward consolidation: a small number of big players increasingly dominates the satellite market while Indias sixty thousand cable channels are slowly being brought under the control of a handful of media consortia. A mixture of bureaucratic inaction and official endorsement of big business is shrinking the space within which Indias cultural diversity can be represented. Meanwhile, new internet-based media though not yet reaching a mass audience have shown a capacity to cause a major upset in the governments news management, such as the recently exposed bribes scandal in the Defence Ministry.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to media reform is the resilience of the bureaucratic mind-set, which is apparently incapable of distinguishing between control and regulation. Indias ruling bureaucracies have wholeheartedly embraced the new ethos of economic liberalism. They are conscious of the value of Indian media exports and are now actively promoting them, but their approach to media reform has yet to go beyond its short term, revenue earning potential.
It remains to be seen if there is the political will to restrain the activities of powerful international conglomerates. There is a danger that governments may view continued direct control over state broadcasting as adequate compensation and leave market forces to dictate media provision for Indias massive audience.
Whats to be done?
Public service broadcasting in India needs to be made more independent both of the market and of the government, as Kiran Karnik, former managing Director of The Discovery Channel, recently argued. It also needs a closer relationship with other instruments of Indias civil society. Enlightened legislation is essential if broadcasters are to meet their commitment to Indias tenacious democracy and remarkable cultural diversity.
Restructuring and re-focussing Doordarshan must be a priority, despite concerns that it cannot deliver. For while there is scope for the harnessing of commercial media for public service purposes, there is still a crucial role for the public broadcaster. In such a vast territory, with as many as forty per cent of the population living in poverty, leaving everything to market forces is in the last resort an abdication of responsibility. Regulation of both public and private sector is essential, now more than ever.
