The Prasar Bharati Mess

The government still calls the shots at Prasar Bharati "� making a mockery of its autonomy

In September this year, Haryana cadre IAS officer Shahbuddin Yakub Quraishi vacated the post of director general of Doordarshan.

Though he had been selected by the Prasar Bharati Broadcasting Corporation's board for a three-year term, he was mysteriously shunted out of Doordarshan in less than two years.

A few eyebrows, and questions, were raised at his sudden departure, but he quickly vanished into the steel ministry as financial advisor and additional secretary.

Public memory tends to be short. Few, for instance, recall that in June 1999, Om Prakash Kejariwal, a central information services officer who rose to the rank of director general, All India Radio (AIR), was similarly "pushed out."

At that time, Kejariwal was also officiating as director general of Doordarshan as well as CEO of Prasar Bharati. Since then, he's been director of the Nehru Library at Teen Murti in Delhi and is due to retire next year.

Both incidents may seem innocuous at first glance. But the two are symptomatic of the malaise at Prasar Bharati, the corporation that is supposed to run Doordarshan and AIR with complete autonomy, that is, freedom from government control.

The malaise warrants the attention of the public, if for no other reason than the fact that some Rs 2,000 crore of the taxpayer's money a year goes into Prasar Bharati "� money that's been wasted.

Predictably, no Prasar Bharati or government official is willing to go on record on the "removal" of the two Doordarshan officers. But it is widely known that they lost their positions as they were not desired by their respective information and broadcasting ministers.

A quick recap for the uninitiated: the 1990 Prasar Bharati Act, notified by the National Front government in 1996, was meant to provide complete autonomy to the two state-controlled media organisations.

Before the I.K. Gujaral-led government was voted out of power, it created Prasar Bharati's first autonomous board in November 1997.

This comprised people like "Mainstream" editor Nikhil Chakravarty, journalist B G Verghese, historian Romilla Thapar and Hindi novelist Rajendra Yadav.

Six years after the first independent board was put in place, the organisation is still light years away from complete autonomy and continues to be dogged by a host of problems. Political interference is just one of them.

Admits Prasar Bharati board member Verghese: "We read about Quraishi's departure first in the newspapers."

Senior Doordarshan and information and broadcasting ministry officials say that the minister had "lost confidence" in the director general.

Sources close to the development say that the director general could have been ousted because he refused to launch the news channel demanded by the government by the August 15, 2003 deadline.

He apparently did not wish to launch a shoddy product and also said "no" to commissioned programmes on the channel.

Quite clearly, the initiative for a 24-hour news channel eventually launched earlier this month, came from the government "� and the government is supposed to steer clear of all programming matters in Doordarshan.

Mind you, Doordarshan News was launched after scrapping Doordarshan Metro, which earned close to Rs 25 crore last year. A senior information and broadcasting ministry official confirms that the move was initiated at the behest of the government.

But Prasar Bharati CEO K.S. Sarma is quick to point out that the channel had the Prasar Bharati board's approval as the project was in Doordarshan's interests.

In 2000, when Pramod Mahajan was information and broadcasting minister, Doordarshan launched its own news channel, investing some Rs 90 crore in it.

But the channel was subsequently shut by Mahajan's successor, Sushma Swaraj, in October 2001. The channel made no money at all. Despite this, this year Doordarshan has attempted to launch another 24-hour terrestrial news channel.

Sarma, of course, denies that political interference exists. "The ministry talks to us only in an advisory capacity," he claims, adding that he's been on both sides of the table "� both as a government servant as director general of Doordarshan and now as head of an autonomous body, having resigned from the government.

"Between then and now, I would say there is complete programming autonomy now. I could not say the same earlier. It is a good change," he says.

Sarma adds that if the money the organisation makes is a measure of autonomy, he may be proved wrong. "For I am busy commissioning good programmes that no one would make as they would not find any sponsors."

He claims that he's ordered serials to be made out of literary classics in 14 regional languages. Film maker Gulzar has been asked to do a 26-episode programme on stories by Hindi literary legend Premchand.

"While I am giving Rs 6 lakh per episode for this, another Rs 90 lakh is being granted for programmes by other well-known people like GV Iyer and Prakash Jha," he points out, in defense of programming autonomy.

However, other senior Doordarshan officials say that the government still calls upon Doordarshan staffers for presentations on channels and programmes.

"In fact, we were answerable to Members of Parliament on the simple decision of sending people to Iraq to cover the war," says a former top Doordarshan official.

"So who are we fooling with the independence line? MPs cannot stomach autonomy," he adds.

It is not difficult to see why autonomy is a no go at Prasar Bharati. The corporation's purse strings are controlled by the Centre which gives it nearly Rs 2,000 crore annually to run its business.

Doordarshan and AIR together generated barely Rs 680 crore in 2002-2003 (they earned Rs 900 crore in the early 1990s.)

In fact, Sarma admits that Doordarshan's revenue will further decline this year though AIR is expected to cross the Rs 100 crore mark for the first time.

"The two are expected to turn in about Rs 600 crore this year," he says. "While the advertising on TV is growing only by two to three per cent, the number of channels keeps growing every day," he says, citing these as reasons for the lower revenue.

Industry observers feel that since Doordarshan and AIR are still dependent on the government for funds, it is unlikely to give up control. For the first phase of the new news channel, the government has granted Prasar Bharati Rs 50 crore.

Prasar Bharati's woes also stem from a weak Act. Since the National Front government, which did not enjoy a majority in the Rajya Sabha, was in a hurry to notify the Act before itbowed out, it issued an ordinance (it wanted the age bar of the CEO extended to 72 to accomodate SS Gill).

"It is not a very tight bill," comments Verghese. For starters, the qualifications laid down for the Prasar Bharati board members do not suit the nature of the job.

"Instead of allowing people from the media and literary fields to be appointed, it should have focused on corporate managers and people with experience in radio and television broadcasting," Verghese points out.

Besides, Doordarshan's director general is traditionally an IAS officer, often from the information and broadcasting ministry, who juggles between being a government servant and an officer of an autonomous corporation.

"It's a major drawback of the system. The senior management must come from outside," says former deputy director general, Doordarshan, Urmila Gupta.

Besides, the law probably did not envisage that creating the post of an executive member (CEO) for Prasar Bharati could lead to conflict with the roles of the director generals of AIR and Doordarshan.

"That is what has been happening over the years; director generals and CEOs have not seen eye to eye on several matters. While the financial powers lie with the director generals, the CEO likes to wield the stick in most matters," confesses a former AIR official.

In fact, he recalls the first Prasar Bharati CEO, S S Gill, insisting on using the same cricket commentary for both radio and television to save costs. "He perhaps forgot that TV takes a break for commercials. The whole thing was a huge disaster," he says with a smirk.

Media critics argue that though the Act was envisaged to create a BBC-like organisation, Prasar Bharati's formation leaves much to be desired. And much of it has to do with half-baked implementation of an already diluted Act.

For starters, the 15-member board has hardly ever been complete since its formation. "In my six-year term as a member, we've almost never had a quorum for meetings," admits Verghese.

While Verghese retires at the end of this month, there will be at least three other vacancies in the board in November. Unless M V Kamath gets an extension, the post of the chairman will also fall vacant.

Besides, whenever there was a quorum, serious issues were given the go by for mundane subjects. Confides a former ex-officio board member: "At least six meetings were devoted to discussing the replacement of old cars," he says.

But when it came to the crunch, like discussing the ouster of a director general appointed by the board itself, "it gave in to the government command without a squeak," says a board member, referring to the Quraishi case.

"That's why I've always called it a signboard rather than a board," adds Verghese. Defending Prasar Bharati's "inaction" on Quraishi's dismissal, Sarma says that the concerned officer requested the board not to make it an issue and confront the government.

In fact, that the implementation of the Act is half-baked is evident from the fact that no attempt has been made to create the Broadcasting Council that was supposed to function as a complaints committee. Neither has the parliamentary committee, consisting of 22 MPs, been set up.

Among other things, the Act also envisaged the transfer of the different cadres of government employees in AIR and Doordarshan to the Prasar Bharati Corporation.

Six years later, no rules have been framed to achieve the mammoth task of transferring the close to 43,000 employees in the two organisations. On its part, the government says that when it first hinted at this a few years ago, the AIR and Doordarshan unions went on strike.

Information and broadcasting ministry secretary Pawan Chopra acknowledges that Prasar Bharati's problems are real, but says that these are part of the transition phase and will be sorted out in due course.

According to a former Doordarshan director general, however, it suits everybody to keep things vague. "Prasar Bharati is a mess because there is big money, big people and big vested interests involved," he says.

"And granting programme extensions is one of the biggest money spinners for officials," he adds. He should know "� he claims he was sounded out by a big Mumbai producer too. "At that point the going rate was Rs 2 lakh per episode," he adds.

In fact, after the launch of Doordarshan's news channel, the question uppermost in people's minds is whether Prasar Bharati, as an autonomous institution, is relevant in today's environment. Opinion is sharply divided on the issue.

Some government officials feel that, thanks to the plethora of independent news channels, Prasar Bharati's autonomy as a source of information is irrelevant.

"Besides, in its current form Prasar Bharati is neither fish nor fowl," remarks an information and broadcasting official. For instance, while the corporation is supposed to function independently, it is the minister who gets questioned by Parliament.

On the flip side, Prasar Bharati cannot be deemed free of government influence either and needs to be given complete autonomy.

Also, the government must decide whether it wants Prasar Bharati to be a public service broadcaster or commercial entity "as a mixture of the two is a non-starter," says a senior Doordarshan official.

Some programme staff officers sense that the government is quietly sending feelers to find out whether Prasar Bharati can be abolished and Doordarshan and AIR returned to the government's fold.

"Why else was a senior AIR official spotted on Doordarshan news recently saying that we want to go back to the government," asks one Doordarshan officer.

It is difficult to establish whether what was broadcast on Doordarshan News was a government point of view or not. But media observers feel that it may be difficult for the present government to scrap the Prasar Bharati Act as the BJP was the biggest proponent of autonomy after the Emergency.

"But if there's a move to kill autonomy it may not be a good idea as still 60 per cent of the country receives only Doordarshan which people, sitting in a multi-channel environment in Delhi, seem to forget," concludes former Doordarshan director general S Y Quraishi.