There are three reasons why this is a misguided approach to regulation.
One, it is the CBFC's job to certify films (and this is a call to all media to stop calling it the censor board). The founding fathers of Indian democracy, in all their wisdom, had credited us with enough good sense when they enshrined the freedom of speech and expression in the Constitution. By trying to anticipate what could be offensive, the right of a person to get offended is held more sacrosanct than the right of people to have access to information and entertainment. This, in turn, means that a lot of the things that cinema does - questioning norms or social behaviour - gets stifled because film-makers start self-censoring. More than 150 years ago the idea of widow remarriage was blasphemy. It offended many people. Does it mean it was wrong? All ideas have a right to be heard, discussed and dismissed or adopted - without the threat of violence, ban or censorship. In that process there will be bad films and good; let the audience reject or accept them.
Two, is a point this column has made umpteen number of times. India's film industry is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. It has survived over 100 years of neglect and lack of money to hold its own against Hollywood. Unlike China or France, there are no quotas or restrictions on foreign films coming in. Yet Hollywood's share of box office revenues hovers between five and seven per cent. Most markets in the world have been annihilated by the US film industry, yet India's little market, a fraction of the size of Hollywood, stands firm. Indians vote for Indian films, of their own free will, with their wallets. This has forced global studios such as Sony, Fox and Disney to invest in local production arms in India, something they rarely do.
Messing with the creative robustness of this market then, is messing with the idea of Indian cinema, good or bad. By sanitising thinking and creativity, all the CBFC will do in the long term is push people towards Hollywood films. That is because ours will become boring, politically correct versions of a sterile, conditioned, conservative milieu.
Hopefully, some of this should get sorted out if the Shyam Benegal committee set up to revamp the CBFC is allowed to do its job.
Three, and most important, the real crisis is of the decline in the number of screens. More than three-fourths of the Rs 13,000-crore film industry's revenues come from the box office. From over 12,000 screens about five years ago there are now just about 10,000 left in India. While multiplexes have been doing a good job, adding 150 to 200 screens every year, single-screen theatres have been shutting at twice that rate. As a result, box office revenues screeched to a halt in 2014. While the numbers for 2015 are yet to come in, the year is not expected to have done much better.
The biggest stumbling block to screen expansion is not capital, but a stifling bureaucracy. Getting permission to open a theatre takes anything from six months to two years. There are dozens of them ready in various parts of the country, awaiting their licence.
A rise in screen count could put India's film industry on steroids. Consider China. In 2011, it was at about 9,000 screens when the state decided to push investment into building screens. By 2014 it had hit over 23,000 screens. Its box office revenues, which account for 90 per cent of all its film revenues, had more than doubled to $4.8 billion. China is now the world's second-largest film market, after the United States.
Can our information and broadcasting ministry then focus on pushing for a rationalisation of the process of opening theatres instead of worrying over whether to allow "Mumbai" or "Bombay" to be used in films?
Twitter: @vanitakohlik