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By S Nandan
The recent recommendations made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the entry of certain entities into radio and television is full of good intentions, but how many of them are implementable in the current confused state of broadcasting in the country?
Like all important legislation, the draft Broadcast Bill (1) floated by the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in July 2007 begins with a powerful invocation to the spirit of the sector. In conclusion it says, ‘Whereas Government has issued guidelines from time to time for regulating the Broadcasting Services and it is felt necessary to give a statutory effect to these guidelines and provide for a comprehensive legislation; Therefore this is a Bill…to provide for regulation of broadcasting services in India for offering a wide variety of entertainment, news, views and information in a fair, objective and competitive manner.’
It goes on to list ten guidelines that need ‘a statutory effect’, ranging from the uplinking guidelines for TV to various radio policies.
There’s a slight catch, though. Most of the existing broadcast guidelines are neither fair nor objective nor even compatible. Sweeping them under an overarching legislative carpet, so to speak, will leave some unsightly bulges.
On television, for instance, the guidelines permit religious programmes but not religious advertisements (a guideline admittedly more honoured in the breach than the observance). Similarly, political ads are now permitted on radio, but not political news, though both religious and political ads are banned under the Advertising Code, and news is permitted on every other medium except radio. You can, however, have news on satellite radio. Religious groups can own TV and community radio channels, but not commercial FM channels, which is also true of state governments, except that state governments can own community radio channels through their ‘autonomous’ non-profit bodies and educational institutions.
The recent recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on ‘Issues relating to entry of certain entities into Broadcasting and Distribution activities’ (2) must be seen in the same incantatory spirit as the prelude to the Broadcast Bill 2007 (which, incidentally, is the 20th version and the fourth Bill since 1997 that somehow did not make it into law).
The immediate provocation for TRAI’s 179-page sermon was a request from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting for “statutory recommendations on the matter”. The I&B Ministry’s hand, in turn, was forced by demands from state governments – notably from the government of Delhi – to allow them to set up FM radio stations and TV channels.
At the conference of State Information Ministers (SIMCON XXVI) in 2007, such demands (3) were raised by many of the attendee states, and much acrimony and confusion ensued. This was not helped by statements such as these from the central government: “We have neither barred the State Govts nor permitted the State Govts specifically by any law to enter into broadcast activity.” Apparently, most of the states are unaware that they don’t need the central government’s permission to set up a cable TV operation (at least, not until the government gets around to redefining the noun ‘person’ in the Cable TV Act). A Rs 500 application at the nearest head post office is all that it takes. (4)
This, then, was the background to the request from the I&B Ministry to the broadcast regulator, TRAI, for its recommendations on the entry of certain entities into radio and TV.
A matter of faith
TRAI’s recommendations broadly cover the entry of various ‘entities’ into broadcasting and distribution – namely, state governments, urban and local bodies, political bodies and religious bodies. And, broadly, TRAI will have none of it.
There are also some incidental suggestions ‘as regards public service broadcasting’, to which I shall return later.
In the light of TRAI’s aversion to state governments, political and religious bodies entering the broadcast business, its recommendations ‘as regards legislative and other measures required’ to keep them out takes on a certain poignancy. As TRAI knows, state governments, political and religious bodies are well entrenched in the radio and TV business. Getting them out of an industry that was valued at Rs 23,220 crore in 2007 and which grows at an annual rate of 18% won’t be a walk in the park.
In the list of 394 kosher TV channels listed by the I&B Ministry, perhaps half a dozen are owned by religious bodies – ranging from Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam to various evangelical groups based abroad. While it may well be possible to ban a TV channel that broadcasts from Dallas or Jerusalem, the prospect of any government switching off the Sri Venkateswara Bhakti channel or Amrita TV seems remote.
The situation becomes even more piquant when, like Amrita TV, it’s a General Entertainment Channel (GEC) owned by a religious body. On the other hand, a number of religious channels are owned not by religious bodies but by companies which sell practically all their air-time to religious bodies. The issue of ownership becomes, so to speak, a matter of faith.
In the radio sector, a significant number of community radio stations are licensed to NGOs and educational institutions run by religious bodies. There are a couple of religious channels up there on WorldSpace satellite radio as well. This is a medium that has remained unregulated for so long that the company has gone bust in the meantime (5) and its eight-year-old satellite is likely to fall out of the sky before anyone gets around to regulating it.
The politics of media ownership
Keeping political bodies out of the radio and TV business would be fraught with greater risk. There is, for instance, scarcely a political party or family in Tamil Nadu that does not own a TV channel. If AIADMK has a mouth-piece in Jaya TV, so does DMK in Kalaignar TV and Raj TV (though they have lost the Sun Network to family squabbles). The PMK has its Makkal TV while the Vasanthchannel is owned by a Congress MLA.
Across the border in Kerala, the CPI (M) promoted Kairali channel has found a rival in the Congress-backed Jai Hind TV. Former Karnataka chief minister Kumaraswamy’s family owns Kasthuri, and the Andhra Pradesh chief minister has not shelved his Indira TV proposal yet.
State governments and local bodies such as panchayats have made determined efforts to enter the media space, like the ill-fated Mana TV & Radio project of the Andhra Pradesh government. (One of the well-documented ‘free radio’ stations in India was, in fact, a state-government funded low power FM channel – Mana Radio – in Oravkkal, in Andhra Pradesh. It ran for about three months before it was shut down by the central government.)
The governments of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Delhi have all made attempts to wrest a broadcast licence from the central government, with notable lack of success. Tamil Nadu had better luck last year with its Arasu Cable Corporation Ltd, a multi-system operator (MSO) run by the state government.
The state governments’ radio plans got a shot in the arm when the I&B Ministry notified its revised Community Radio Guidelines in December 2006. The new policy makes all sorts of non-profit entities – ranging from schools to NGOs – eligible for a community radio (CR) licence. (6) It didn’t take long for state governments to figure out that they ran most of the schools in their states, and several other non-profit bodies besides. So the Bihar government will soon set up 11 ‘community radio’ stations in state-run schools in Patna and Nalanda (the CM’s constituency, incidentally) which, as the Bihar government’s public relations secretary points out, “will also be an extension of the CM’s weekly durbars”. (7)
The Madhya Pradesh government’s effort to set up radio stations in tribal schools and through its own non-profit agencies has run into rough weather at the I&B Ministry, which is increasingly alarmed by the number of CR licences being snapped up by just the sort of entities that TRAI wants to keep out of the sector. (The irony that the I&B Ministry itself runs ‘community radio’ stations through its supposedly autonomous institutions like IIMC, FTII and SRFTII is lost on the government.)
End of transmission
With all these presumably ineligible entities – from state governments to religious and political bodies – crowding the broadcast spectrum, it will be interesting to see how the government proposes to implement the next item in TRAI’s wish-list: ‘Providing for appropriate exit route for such entities which have been already granted permission by the Government but are likely to be hit by the proposed disqualifications.’
Getting a broadcaster off the radio or TV dial is easier said than done, especially if he has been there for some time. In country after country, the only way governments have cut down the number of unlicensed broadcasters – sometimes running into the hundreds, as in Italy – is by giving them a licence (an interesting example being the Voice of Tigers radio in Sri Lanka). Any exit policy based on shifting ownership criteria can quickly blow up into a free-speech issue and lead to endless litigation.
(Or worse. When dozens of illegal radio stations, run by religious leaders, sprouted across the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan and rival broadcasters began attacking each other, TRAI’s Pakistani counterpart, PEMRA, finally acted on the principle that more can be achieved with a government order (GO) and a gun than with a GO alone. After 25 people were killed in a fire-fight between hostile radio stations in the town of Bara (8), Pakistani troops closed them permanently with mortar shells – an option not open to the Indian government, one assumes. PEMRA used security forces to shut down at least 88 of the 100 or more illegal radio stations in NWFP. Even today, Maulana Fazlullah aka ‘Radio Mullah’ runs his Talibanesque radio station in the Swat valley with impunity.)
TRAI has recently initiated a consultation on cross media ownership. It is obvious that any restrictions on cross media ownership proposed by TRAI will affect companies that currently own large swathes of print, TV and radio, often in the same city. The curbs could also hit those who own both distribution systems as well as content channels, as well as those who tend to monopolise the market in city, state and country within each media segment.
Since the entire media market is dominated by half a dozen players, it comes as no surprise that the consultation process has been inexplicably extended twice. TRAI’s Open House on the subject next month (December 2, 2008, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi) (9) should be fraught with interest.
Public Service broadcasting obligation
Of all the items on TRAI’s current wish-list, the one that seems to have a fair chance of success is the modest proposal that private radio and TV channels should broadcast public service programmes for at least 30 minutes a week. These public service programmes would be funded from a proposed ‘Public Service Broadcasting Obligation Fund’, along the lines of the telecom sector’s Universal Service Obigation (USO) fund, with contributions from the central government.
This is not a startlingly original proposal – there are similar public service broadcasting obligations in the Broadcast Bill – but it’s a step in the right direction. In the last phase of FM licensing, the I&B Ministry had inserted a clause in the tender document that all private radio stations should set aside an hour a day for government programmes. Whether the radio channels actually did so is moot – as far as I know, no government department has claimed its daily hour on any FM channel.
In any case, private channels that pay crores of rupees in licence fees are unlikely to give away free air-time for the public good. The PSB Obligation Fund may well succeed where appeals to their higher nature have failed.
A cynic might observe that setting up a government-appointed committee ‘to approve and certify programmes as fit for being broadcast as part of the public service broadcasting obligation’ could prove a Trojan horse. The subjects approved for PSB programmes include ‘protection of cultural heritage, national integration etc, etc,’ which are often code-words for a number of dubious political agendas.
Citizen space
A better option, though one that’s less likely to succeed, is TRAI’s proposal for the creation of a ‘citizen space’ on all channels – public as well as private – ‘so as to enable the common man to utilise the medium for expressing his views and opinions’.
Conceding that it may be a trifle difficult for the common man to gain access to national TV channels, TRAI suggests that access to ‘citizen space’ should be given at the community level, using community TV and local cable networks. The snag in this excellent scheme of things is that India’s local cable networks comprise over 60,000 essentially lawless cable operators and thousands of multi-system operators (MSOs). Obligating them to carry citizen space channels or even citizen space programmes would be, to say the least, a considerable challenge.
As for community TV, TRAI had made some very constructive and far-sighted recommendations on that subject, too, to the I&B Ministry. (10) That was three years ago, in August 2005, and that was the last anyone heard of it. Indeed, almost all the recommendations made by TRAI to the I&B Ministry since 2006 seem to have sunk without a trace, and this includes some important ones like the recommendations on digitisation of cable TV, on CAS roll out, on mobile TV, on satellite radio policy and the next phase of FM licensing, to name but a few. In fact, the only set of TRAI’s recommendations on which the government has moved with haste is the one on Internet TV (IPTV) which, as an uncharitable critic points out, will mostly benefit the government’s own telecom networks. (11)
The thing about TRAI’s recommendations is that, like Cassandra’s prophesies, their insight is obscured by incapacity. TRAI’s recommendations are not binding on the I&B Ministry. They are not even binding on the Telecom Ministry. For fairly inane reasons, TRAI is the broadcast regulator, while the policy maker and implementing agency remains the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting.
So, when TRAI recommends that FM channels may be allowed to air news (as long as it is taken from ‘authorised sources’), the I&B Ministry hears this as ‘FM channels may be allowed to broadcast AIR news’. That this regulatory sleight-of-hand goes against the spirit of their own Broadcast Bill, with its emphasis on ‘offering a wide variety of news, views and information’, as well as the 1995 Supreme Court judgment on the airwaves, (12) is proof that much more is at stake here than Article 19 and the interests of the viewer and listener.
I am sure it is not lost on anyone that, in an election year, getting some 261 popular FM channels to re-broadcast AIR news could be worth a lot more to certain political entities than a slew of political ads.
Endnotes
1. http://mib.nic.in/informationb/POLICY/Bill200707.pdf
2. http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/PressReleases/610/recom12nov08.pdf
3. http://mib.nic.in/SIMCONMinutes200208.pdf
4. The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995
5. ‘WorldSpace files for bankruptcy in the US’ – The Hindu Business Line, October 19, 2008
6. www.mib.nic.in/CRS/crsmainpg.htm
7. ‘Radio Bihar Calling’, Outlook magazine,March 17, 2008
8. BBC News, March 31, 2006
9. http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=44662
10. ‘Recommendations on Issues Relating to Private Terrestrial TV Broadcast Service – 29.8.2005’
11. http://www.scatmag.com/nov08_IBignore.htm
12. Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting vs Cricket Assn of Bengal and Anr – 9.2.1995
InfoChange News & Features, November 2008
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