“Five lives down?” – asks the IB Ministry.

“Five lives down?” – asks the IB Ministry.

The history of broadcast media dates down to 1924, beginning with a private radio service in Madras (Chennai). In the same year the British Government granted a license to the privately owned Indian Broadcasting Company to open radio stations in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata). Later in 1936 it was placed under the Department of Communication and was renamed as the All India Radio (AIR). AIR further went on to become an independent body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcast, after India gained independence.

Broadcast media, in 1959, took a major step further with the introduction of television in the nation. Initially television was not really an area where the government wanted to make heavy investments as they felt that it was a way too expensive a medium for the majorly poor population of India, and television had to work its way out to prove the government’s view wrong. Television Broadcast started in September of 1959, as part of AIR service, and programs were telecasted twice a week for an hour a day on topics like rights and duties, health, traffic and road sense, etc.

It was only in 1982 that the first national channel, the government owned, doordarshan was broadcasted, and it took the nation by storm with its epic shows “Ramayan” and “Mahabharat”. Doordarshan enjoyed it’s “solo player in the market” status for about a decade till the launch of Zee Television in the 1990’s which led to entry of many other such channels (namely, Sony Tv and Star Plus).

This was all that was needed to make television a household concept. The very fact that television was so rapidly spreading across the nation made the government feel the need to levy some sort of a regulation on this broadcast media, hence The Cable Television Network Regulation Act came into existence in 1994. This act was mainly formulated to put a check on the content of various foreign programs and advertisements which was not really in sync with the culture of our nation and the government felt that there was a serious need for the filtering of such content which was being broadcasted nationwide and was being viewed in innumerable households by just as many age groups.

After this act, every now and then the government has tried to draft bills to regulate broadcast media, but sadly they have remained just that – bills!

Some such bills are as follows:

The Broadcast Bill of 1997 proposed to establish an independent authority and to create a level playing field for indigenous broadcasters. Sadly, it did not get past a joint parliamentary committee set up to examine the legislation after it was tabled in Parliament.

The Communications Convergence Bill of 2000 was aimed to create a single regulatory authority (the Communications Commission of India) to deal with advancements in information and communications technology, this also could not move any further than remaining an ignored bill.

The Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill of 2006 gained a lot of public attention and was extremely criticized for its horrendous attempts to empower the government and it’s representatives to as much as to cripple the broadcast media, hence this bill also remained a piece of paper.

Talking about today, the government has drafted the 5-violation norm for television channels as a base for the renewal of their licenses. This states that all channels are provide by a license for a period of 10 years, after which this license has to attain a renewal, which would be considered only and only if the channel has not violated the terms and conditions of the program and advertising code on more than five occasions.

Now, the question, which is buzzing in my head, is, who decides what exactly is “violation”? Will the government decide? Will it be an independent body? Or is it the programmers and advertisers? Actually it would be or could be anybody BUT the viewers!

Why is it that when we are the ones who are eventually going to sit in our houses and watch on our television sets the shows that we like, we get no say in deciding what is appropriate to show and what is not?

I Believe that in a democracy like ours, the government and other public bodies are actually formulated to voice our opinions but I rather feel gagged by these very same bodies who are hell bent on taking every decision by themselves, based entirely on their personal discretion of what is acceptable and what is not, instead of trying to find out the changing trends of viewership and the level of acceptance of the broadcasted content in today’s educated, modern day society.