Surinder Sud: Farmers see a fuzzy picture

FARM VIEW/ Ignou's efforts notwithstanding, the Krishi channel is still struggling to take off

Five months after its launch by then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the exclusive TV channel for farmers, Krishi channel, remains a non-starter.

Although the present Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has also endorsed the need for such a channel and has vowed to lend it full support, it remains an orphan venture.

The agriculture ministry, whose baby it is actually supposed to be, seems reluctant to tend it, though its foster mother, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (Ignou), is trying its best to keep it alive.

Indeed, neither funding nor technical and subject matter support are a problem for this channel because it was launched as a 10th Plan scheme with outlays earmarked for its different components. What is wanting is the will to allow it to flourish.

The launch of Krishi channel has been the result of a long-pending demand for a full-fledged TV channel and FM radios for farmers, which has been voiced even in Parliament from time to time.

The 10th Plan document highlighted the need to make Indian agriculture globally competitive by lending it mass media support for disseminating information on farm technology, marketing, weather and other vital aspects.

The agriculture ministry's proposal seeking the setting-up of Krishi channel had clearly stated that its objective was to use television and radio with their massive reach as a vehicle for farm extension. The electronic media has the advantage of reaching a wide audience at a low cost.

From a practical point of view, a full-time Krishi channel is viable. The agriculture ministry's move to tie up with Ignou for running the Krishi channel, too, is logically sound.

For, this university has the proven record and experience of nationally telecasting its "Gyan Darshan" educational TV programmes. Besides, it possesses spare satellite capacity to air the Krishi channel though Insat transponders.

This apart, Ignou has a School of Agricultural Sciences headed by former Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) Director-General Panjab Singh to provide the programme content and technical back-up.

To top it all, Ignou has state-of-the-art facilities for producing TV programmes at its Electronic Media Production Centre, which is linked to Insat transponders to up-link and air the programmes.

The 10th Plan provides Rs 47.02 crore for the production and telecast of programmes by Ignou. It has also earmarked an outlay of Rs 170.42 crore for the production and telecast of locally-relevant agriculture programmes using low-power transmitters (LPT) with a 15-km radius coverage range.

Besides, Rs 59.3 crore is provided for the use of the All India Radio FM transmitter network to air regular, farm-oriented FM radio programmes for farmers.

Here ends the positive side of the Krishi channel episode. Barring Ignou's continued telecast of a daily, one-hour farm capsule (repeated three times a day), nothing else has clicked. The reach of the Krishi channel is negligible since it is accessible only through cable and none of the cable operators is actually airing it.

Although the agriculture ministry had proposed legal and administrative steps to ensure that the Ignou agriculture channel was carried by cable operators, little has actually been done about it.

Neither has this channel been declared as a "must-carry channel" for cable operators, nor has any action been taken on setting up the necessary network for down-linking this channel to enable access through terrestrial antennae.

In fact, the agriculture ministry had promised to provide funds for installing 500 such down-link points in important village clusters. But so far, even the sites for these centres have not been identified.

As a result, the tenders for procuring the downlink hardware are being called off. Mercifully, Ignou, on its own, is going ahead with its plans to put both Krishi channel and Gyan Darshan on the direct-to-home (DTH) mode.

The Krishi channel's efforts to tide over the initial shortage of agricultural programmes by acquiring ready-made films from private producers have also fallen flat due to back-tracking by the ministry.

Oddly enough, the ministry's veto to this move (recommended by the Krishi channel's policy committee having representatives from the ministry) came when the tenders for such programmes had already been placed in the national dailies and bids had started coming in.

To compound the problems, the agriculture ministry is dilly-dallying in even releasing the money for procuring programmes that were formally outsourced by Ignou for production by private producers empanelled with the university and the ministry.

The delay in releasing the funds has also jeopardised Ignou's plans to set up Krishi channel's regional programme production centres at eight state agricultural universities across the country. What is worse, the Krishi channel's bid to raise its own resources through advertising is also being thwarted by the ministry.