Television at 50

AMIDST the tumult of recent events the alarums and excursions in Parliament, insurgent attacks in West Bengal and Jharkhand, and the wayward behaviour of the monsoon some groups of scholars and media watchers quietly celebrated the 50th anniversary of the advent of television in India.

In 1959, using some equipment donated to All India Radio (AIR) by Philips after an exhibition, a television channel was started in Delhi. It broadcast programmes for an hour twice a week. Its programmes could be seen mostly in that area of New Delhi called Lutyens Delhi, where the great and the powerful stayed and who were, for the most part, the people who were provided the only television sets then available in India: bulky black-and-white sets that had two controls, one to switch the set on and off and adjust volume and the other to brighten or darken the picture.

There were some other sets too. In his book India on Television (Harper Collins India, 2008), Nalin Mehta mentions 21 gifted sets, which were installed in what were called tele-clubs, and an additional 50 gifted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. He also mentions the funding of the first formal educational telecasts to 250 schools around Delhi on certain days of the week. Programme formats were simple, and those appearing in discussion programmes were self-conscious and stiffly formal. In all the music programmes, there was just one continuously held shot (understandable, since there was, in all likelihood, just one camera). One remembers seeing a programme where the camera focussed on a 78 rpm record playing on a gramophone all the way through until the song ended.

But those were early days. It only took a short while for television producers to feel their way to more interesting ways of using the new medium. They had, in fact, only to look across the border. Pakistan had started television a few years earlier and had a regular channel operating when the medium came to India. In the first years after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru and his government decided as a matter of policy that they would concentrate on improving radio coverage and that television was a luxury the country could not afford at that time. Consequently, the experimental broadcasts with the donated equipment remained experimental.

Perceptions changed when Indira Gandhi became Minister of Information & Broadcasting. She believed that television was a vitally important means of communication and pushed for its establishment on a regular footing. This new policy was given greater importance when she became Prime Minister following the sudden death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, and in 1972, a television station came up in Bombay (now Mumbai), the second in the country, followed by stations in Jalandhar and Srinagar. Thereafter, in quick succession, stations opened in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Madras (now Chennai) and a few other cities.

All of these were operated by AIR, which had a special division called AIR-TV; however, very soon this was hived off to become Doordarshan. It was run by the government, as was AIR. It was assumed then that the right to operate radio and television was unquestionably that of the government, an assumption carried forward without question from colonial times.

The nature of the programmes broadcast by these stations varied, but some of them were outstanding, made by people such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Vijay Tendulkar and others. The finest creative minds in cinema saw this new medium as something exciting and made memorable programmes, which attracted a large number of viewers. With the starting of these stations, television sets began to appear in the market and were bought by those eager to see what the new medium had to provide.

For a long time, television remained an urban medium, not because of any conscious bias in programming but for technical reasons. The television signal is a line-of-sight signal, that is, it travels in a straight line as light does. When the earth curves the signal does not and is thus lost beyond a particular point (around 75 kilometres from the transmitter, if one were to use the most powerful transmitter available). Thus, those who had television sets in metropolitan cities and their suburbs could see programmes if they were within, say, 60 km of the television transmitter, after which the signal got increasingly hazy until it disappeared.

Then, in 1982 came the second decisive moment in the 50 years of Indian television: the use of satellites and the switch-over to colour. This was ostensibly because of the Asian Games, but it altered the nature of television radically. A television signal sent to a transponder on a satellite is amplified and sent back to earth to cover the entire country, much like the beam from a torch. The signals are weak and need re-amplification. This task is performed by the television dish antenna. The centre of the antenna has a device that collects the weak signals captured by the dish and amplifies them to normal strength.

What this meant was that one station could broadcast programmes to the entire country. That station, it was decided, would be Delhi, and the programme, called the National Programme, would be carried by all the regional stations from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., that is, the period when most people would be able to watch television. Its effect was that local stations lost their importance as the centre for interesting programmes; the action shifted to Delhi.

The third decisive moment was in 1990, when CNN positioned a satellite close to India and telecast the Gulf War live. Suddenly, audiences realised they could see a channel other than Doordarshan, a realisation not lost on private entrepreneurs. They used Hong Kong as a base to start private television channels and beamed programmes airlifted from India to satellites positioned close to India. Private satellite television had arrived in India.

Television in India was faced with an exciting challenge. Would it go the way of television in Europe and Japan, where publicly funded television networks were the dominant players and private channels played a markedly secondary role, or would it go the United States way and swing over to purely commercial television, controlled by private corporations and media barons? Tragically, it chose the latter alternative, not deliberately, as a carefully thought out policy, but owing to a series of hasty, ill-conceived reactions to the advent of private television.

Unmindful of the original mandate given to Doordarshan, financial experts in the government decreed that it should fund itself. To do so Doordarshan had to look increasingly at commercially viable programmes, and its cumbrous procedures made private channels more attractive to advertising agencies and their clients.

More and more private channels came up, more and more glitzy programmes fascinated audiences, and Doordarshan fell away from public gaze even though it still had large numbers watching its programmes. But these were often dull or melodramatic and mediocre in terms of quality as it virtually stopped making any of its own programmes and became little more than a rentier renting airtime to private producers. Its revenues looked impressive some Rs.800 crore or so but its expenses spiralled out of control, making it dependent on state grants. Even though it was then part of an autonomous corporation, Prasar Bharati, it remained, in real terms, an appendage of the government. It could neither occupy the kind of dominant position enjoyed by public service broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC in the United Kingdom, NHK in Japan, SVT in Sweden, TF1 in France, ZDF and ARD in Germany or ABC in Australia, nor could it compete in the commercial world with private channels on their own flexible and often rather murky terms.

And so, in its 50th year, television in India is very firmly private and commercial, with Doordarshan still wondering what its identity really is. The challenge was not faced, and one cannot help feeling that the losers are the people of India, with whose money the medium was set up.