SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 Edition

 

 

THE mandate for public service broadcasting in India is today enshrined in the Prasar Bharati Corporation. Few will argue that it has essentially failed to deliver. There is continuing confusion and ambiguity about its role and hence inevitably the structures that will make it truly effective and successful. For public broadcasting in India to develop its constituency, we have waited for far too long for PrasarBharati to rise to its potential and its obligations. Yet there seems possibility again. A Committee of Ministers is reportedly engaged in evolving a strategy to re-vision and restructure Prasar Bharati. A draft Broadcasting Bill is stirring debate and consternation especially amongst the commercial channels. While their concerns about the government’s heavyhanded attempts at content regulation are widely shared, there is much else in the draft bill that calls for celebration - especially the efforts at mandatory public service and locally produced content obligations for all broadcasters. Commercial broadcasting is not interested in audiences who are not consumers of the goods and services that their advertisers promote. This excludes hundreds of millions of the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised and those not driven by cultures of consumerism. Commercial television that fails to deliver audiences to its advertisers cannot survive. In its programmes, it is obliged to perpetuate and promote values and information that will encourage their consumption. This applies not only to 'entertainment' programmes and channels but to 'news and current affairs'. Yet if this synchronicity is to work effectively, there must be an illusion of credibility and an apparent commitment to the public good so long as this does not run counter to the advertisers’ interests and sub texts.

This is the only reality check, apart from the law. A society that lacks an effective alternative media space or voice diminishes its fundamental democratic freedoms and choices while reinforcing the cultures of the privileged. Public broadcasting delivers messages to audiences. Its value rests in its independence and credibility. Independence both from the imperatives of commercial broadcasting and that of the government or the state. It must set exemplary standards of quality and serve as an example of good taste, of decency and values; it must be impartial and should meet the needs for information and entertainment particularly of those that commercial broadcasting excludes. It must synchronize with the principles of a good ‘public enterprise’ committed to transparency and accountability. Public broadcasting represents a vital democratic space for an independent credible voice that informs and articulates the agendas, concerns and needs of civil society and the community as they are locally perceived. It needs to be the contemporary repository of its heritage and the best of its culture using its platform to preserve, promote and perpetuate them. It must set standards of excellence, of experimentation and innovation in the broadcast media. Public broadcasting to survive and grow must remain on the cutting edge of the convergence technologies.

Public service broadcasting is not merely the supply push of development support programmes, of what a centralised bureaucracy, or a group of ‘experts’ believe the community must be told. The imperative is to create a public culture through the airwaves that is plural and equitable in its representation. Even as the broadcast media have become more powerful and influential, public entitlement to the creation and shaping of content has not grown in proportion to its growth. This does not mean that public broadcasting has to be dull,pedantic and boring. It can and must compete for at least some of the audiences that commercial television reaches out to but more importantly those that it does not care about. It does this by reaching out effectively to the demand pull from both kinds of audiences for their information and entertainment needs that commercial television is unwilling or unable to meet. Even as successive governmentshave paid little heed to the crumbling structures of public broadcasting in India (paid for by public money), they have been obsessed with a supply push of what they believe the public ought to see or hear, inevitably with a generous lacing of the government’s political agendas. Audiences with an alternative have simply switched off. Yet public funds continue to be used to send out futile radio and television images into thin air. It is time to look at a responsible response to the existing real audience needs, and to help create these where they do not exist.

The Public Service Broadcasting Service Trust (PSBT) was born out of a felt need to create a new, sensitive, empowering and independent voice in the nonprint media – a voice that was not driven by merely commercial imperatives, or of the emerging monopolies and nexus between big business, politics and the media, or of the imperatives of state funded and managed media. It is a small initiative that provides modest funds and a space at prime time on Doordarshan News (Saturday’s 10.30 pm) for 52 independent voices to articulate their passions, visions and concerns using the genre of the documentary film. PSBT has not sought sensationalism or explicit confrontation, though that might bring in TRPs. Rather, it has provided quiet, considered insights and dare I add wisdom to focus on contemporary predicaments and valuable elements of our heritage. We are privileged to have people like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Kiran Karnik, Sharmila Tagore, Sunita Narain and Aruna Vasudev as our trustees and Pt. Ravi Shankar, Fali Nariman, Anjolie Ela Menon, Habib Tanvir, Mark Tully, and Vandana Shiva on board. We feel together we can make a difference to the cause of public broadcasting. In the public spirit of our enterprise in public broadcasting, Prasar Bharati shares our costs of production and provides airtime of upto an hour a week. We started five years ago with a grant from the Ford Foundation for the other half of the cost of production and our operational expenses. So far we have support for only half an hour each week. It is a very small space. With FordFoundation winding up their support for media projects in India, our financial situation has become tenuous. While we continue tofind funds, these come with agendas and strings attached - compromising the very principle of ‘independent’ content that drives us. We have thus far supported the production of more than 300 independent documentary films from about 200 odd film makers, most of them aged under 30 and half of them women from all over India. Apart from Doordarshan, these have been screened in as many festivals in India and abroad from MIFF to Oberhausen, Berlin, Sundance, Yamagata, Montreal, et all. They have won close to 50 awards.Produced at modest budgets of under Rs 5 lakhs, they compete with the best, often produced at budgets between 10 to 100 times that of ours globally, in terms of form and content. We encourage film makers to work with the newer, less expensive digitaltechnologies so that they explore more innovative treatments and approaches to the documentary, afford more time on location and create truly in-depth incisive films. We urge film makers to evolve honest realistic budgets and believe it is legitimate for them to make a decent living from their work. We are upfront about the range of budgets we can support. These are generous by most Indian standards.

We seek to demonstrate that it is possible and viable for a small, independent, engaging and constructive voice to find a relevant,credible place in a growing cacophony of sounds and images disseminated through cable and airwaves. We believe that in a spirit of genuine partnership, rather than of confrontation, of evoking respect for what we are doing and how we try and go about it, we can actually do something beyond merely complaining. We seek the shared joy that comes from achieving something difficult and meaningful together. Crucial to PSBT’s agenda is the effort to democratise the electronic media by encouraging the production and creation of media content by the community, and not just by trained professionals, or large production houses who may have access to high-end technology and large resources We have produced instructional materials in the form of DVDs on the basics of Camera, Editing, Sound and ‘How to Read A Film’. These were funded by UNESCO and are being distributed globally. These are available at a nominal cost, as are our instructional books that include ‘The Open Frame’ – a documentary reader, ‘How to Write A Script’, The Art of Interviewing’, etc. We conduct workshops on ‘User Created Media’ wherein we encourage people to learn how to create small films onissues of concern they feel passionately about, and upload them for dissemination on the Internet. Some aspects of our vision will be more difficult to achieve than others. Ours is one small, tentative step. We are trying to create a small ripple. India needs millions of ripples of energy and daring that will sweep down the mighty walls of resistance, corruption and inequity.

Rajiv Mehrotra is director of the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT).

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