IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED INDEPENDENCE, a certain kind of puritanism entered All India Radio, out of which Doordarshan was later formed. The first information minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, had already issued a diktat against providing employment in broadcasting to those whose “private life was a public scandal.” This rule, though never applied to men, banned an entire generation of talented courtesans and artists from a promising platform.
The emergence of television in the shadow of this paternalistic developmental state was one of the factors that led to the Indian government’s dominance over television media and the latter’s preoccupation with access. Besides attempts to popularise the government’s welfare programmes, there was little thought given to the enormous possibilities offered by the media. The Chanda Committee set up by Indira Gandhi, who was then the information and broadcasting minister, concluded in a 1966 report that ministers had repeatedly treated television as an “expensive luxury” intended for the entertainment of affluent sections of society. All this was miles away from the broadcasting scene in the United States and the United Kingdom, which were capitalist affairs, with regulatory authorities in place to evenly disburse its benefits.
Another factor leading to the government’s excessive control over television media was the nineteenth-century Telegraph Act, which remained consistently out of sync with evolving technology. The Act survives even today, but it has been considerably neutralised since 1995, when the Supreme Court ruled that airwaves were public property over which the government had no monopoly. Since then, the telegraph has been redefined as any instrument capable of transmitting or receiving “signs, signals, writings, images, sounds or intelligence of any nature.” Over the years, however, its very existence in the statute books has dampened the entrepreneurial spirit that burst forth in the wake of economic liberalisation. That the enforcement of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 occurred four years after CNN aired the Gulf War, and after the rise of the cable television industry in Mumbai and other metropolitan cities, is proof of this. In addition, the Act tailed the launch of NDTV—as a production house—by a good seven years.
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