The ministry’s unfinished business

BY Sajan Venniyoor| IN Law and Policy | 19/01/2009

It’s difficult to read the I&B Ministry’s year end review (‘Major Initiatives of I&B Ministry during 2008’[1]) without a sense of déjà vu.

Yes, the Azadi Express – a mobile train exhibition commemorating 1857 – was chugging along in 2008, but wasn’t it flagged off in 2007? Sure enough, it was one of the ministry’s major initiatives in 2007 as well[2]. Yes, the DAVP’s advertisement policy was revised in 2008, but wasn’t it also revised in 2007? It was – and it’s the same 2007 increase in quota of ads for small and medium newspapers that’s being passed off as a new initiative in 2008.

Is the 54^th National Film Awards an ‘initiative’, or for that matter, the lack-lustre 39^th International Film Festival of India? Surely an initiative, by its very definition, should be a new thing, an introductory act or step. So what exactly did the I&B ministry initiate in 2008?

‘Digitization of cable services’, crows the year-end review. Excellent. The recommendation for digitizing cable TV services has been lying with the I&B ministry since 2005. So was 2008 the year when Indian TV finally went digital? Sadly, no. The Government is merely "working on devising a suitable regulatory framework’ for digitization of cable services. As for restructuring cable services as recommended by TRAI, the policy is only ‘being considered’.

How about the mandatory roll-out of Conditional Access System (CAS), pending since 2007? The ministry is working on it, we are assured, while simultaneously considering how to bring down the cost of set-top boxes. (How serious they are about rolling out CAS may be gauged from their interpretation of ‘SMS’ as ‘Short Messaging Service’ rather than, correctly, ‘Subscriber Management System’).

Not quite radio active

Among the policies that were considered, examined, devised, framed or worked on by the ministry in 2008, without actually being announced, are Head-end-in-the-Sky (HITS), Mobile TV and Satellite Radio.

Satellite radio – familiar to many in India as WorldSpace – has been available here since 2001, while the policy to regulate it has been in orbit for nearly as long.

TRAI’s recommendations on satellite radio were sent to the ministry in 2005, and the ministry’s comments on TRAI’s recommendations were sent back for further recommendations, and the ministry is now in the process of ‘firming up its views’ on TRAI’s final comments. In the meantime, WorldSpace has gone bankrupt[3] and it seems likely that its eight year old satellite will fall out of the sky long before the policy is firm enough to be announced. 

On the radio front in general, other than tweaking the commercial FM policy – by allowing de-mergers and the creations of subsidiaries – the ministry also claims to have liberalized the Community Radio policy by bringing in ‘civil society and voluntary organizations working not for profit also under its ambit.’  

A laudable move, except that it was done in 2006.

Since the revised CR policy was announced two years ago, so many new twists have been added to the licensing process that if the government actually had "a view to allow greater participation by the civil society on issues of development and social change’, they have disguised their intentions very well. By the end of 2008, exactly two civil society organizations had managed to go on air – Sangham Radio in Medak district and Radio Bundelkhand in Orchha. 

Work in progress

Some of the policies and guidelines announced in 2008 are wholly pie-in-the-sky. Take the ‘detailed guidelines framed for the State Level and District Level Monitoring Committees to look into the violation of Cable TV Networks Rules".

Alarmed by the range and ingenuity of malpractices committed by many of the 60,000 odd – the exact figure is unknown – local cable operators and their tendency to show ‘undesirable content’ on local cable, the I&B ministry asked the states to set up state and district level monitoring committees for cable TV. (Far from being dominated by NGOs and district-level psychologists, as their year-end review might suggest, these committees are stuffed with District Magistrates, Police Commissioners, sundry State Secretaries and PROs).

The paper trail reveals that this wasn’t even a 2008 initiative. The original order went out in 2005, and predictably, it was ignored by state governments. The 2008 initiative was no more than a gentle reminder to state governments to pull up their socks and get on with it[4].

The one thing conspicuous by its absence in the year-end review of 2008 is the ill-fated Broadcast Bill. Like many other policy initiatives that strut and fret their hour upon government websites and then is heard no more, the Broadcast Bill made its appearance in 1997, in 2000, in 2006 (when it was at an "advanced stage for deliberations"), in 2007 (when it was put up for "wider consultations"), until it softly and silently vanished away in 2008.

Along with the Broadcast Bill went the contentious Content Code[5]. Having made its less-than-stellar debut in 2007, the Code had lost much of its sheen by 2008 when the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA) unveiled its self-regulatory Code of Ethics in October. The spectacular failure of the NBA Code a month later, during the Mumbai terrorist attack, has given a new lease of life to the ministry’s Content Code and no doubt we’ll hear more of it in the 2009 year-end review.

Rather than review its non-existent initiatives, it would be more instructive to study ‘the long list of policy matters that the I&B ministry has been sitting on.’[6] To name just a few, they include

·         Recommendations on Private Terrestrial TV – pending since 29 August 2005

·         Recommendations on Digitalisation of Cable Television - pending since 14 Sept 2005

·         Policy On Satellite Radio – pending since 27 June 2005

·         Mandatory CAS Roll Out - pending since 27 Dec 2007

·         HITS (Head-end in the sky)  Policy and licensing norms - pending since 15 Feb 2008

·         Phase III of FM licensing – pending since 22 Feb 2008

·         Recommendations on Mobile TV – pending since 23 Jan 2008

·         Guidelines on Television Ratings (TRPs) – pending since Aug 2008

·         Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill – pending since 1997, if one considers all its earlier avatars.

(The only media policy that was actually announced in 2008 was the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) policy which, as the uncharitable critic quoted above observes, was rushed through mostly because it benefits the government’s own telecom companies).

What lies beneath

When it comes to trumpeting major initiatives, MIB is handicapped by not being an implementing agency, like the ministries of Telecom or Railways or Rural Development. While Rural Development unveils grandiose schemes like Bharat Nirman and NREGS, and the Railways can always lay on a new service and generate vast revenues, the I&B Ministry is no more than a policy-making body, for the "formulation and administration of the rules and regulations and laws relating to information, broadcasting, the press and films."[7]

This rule-making is ostensibly to promote the ‘free flow of information’, but there’s the rub. Information flows freely in spite of regulation, not because of it. Ill equipped to keep pace with the runaway growth of information and communication technologies, as the Supreme Court had noted in 1995, almost the only thing the I&B ministry can do is put the occasional hurdle in its path.

A case in point is the proposal to amend the Programme Code and the Cable TV Act in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. To quote a senior journalist, the proposals are "so far-reaching that nobody who believes in the freedom of the press can possibly support them."[8] As he says, the restrictions imposed under the new rules – vetting of TV feeds by authorized officers or permission to carry only approved (Doordarshan) feeds during an emergency – may sound reasonable in the context of the Mumbai operation, but they could be used to censor coverage of many other events: communal riots, police brutality, anti-government protests etc.

Allowing private radio channels to carry only AIR and DD news is open to similar misuse, but that was another decision taken in 2008[9].

As the Azadi Express, a major initiative of the I&B ministry, whistled to a halt in 2008, one of the fall-outs of the 1857 uprising it did not highlight was the 1885 Indian Telegraph Act, which continues to wield its primeval power over broadcast policies to this day.

"The Electric Telegraph has saved India!" cried an exultant Robert Montgomery at Lahore, after receiving a timely telegraphic warning that the mutineers had entered Delhi. Since then, a fearful passion to regulate and control all manner of wired and wireless media has been a trope of broadcast policy-making in India.

The Telegraph Act, with its rapturous descriptions of pillars and posts ("a post, pole, standard, stay, strut or other above ground contrivance for carrying, suspending or supporting a telegraph line") doesn’t quite make the cut for regulating communications in the age of the internet. But the memory of that fragile cable link between Delhi and Ambala, narrowly saving India from the savage hordes, haunts the inheritors of the Raj and shapes their communication policies to this day.

It is not surprising, then, that one of the very few successful initiatives of the I&B Ministry in 2008 was the ‘state-of-the-art’ Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC), set up at a cost of Rs.19.65 crores, to monitor a hundred potentially disruptive TV channels. And we already know one of the I&B ministry’s major initiatives of 2009: upgrading EMMC to monitor another two hundred TV channels.