T N Ninan: An Indian C-Span?

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Imagine the front rows of the Rajya Sabha when it convenes again. In the Opposition benches, there will be virtually all the stars of the last Lok Sabha's Treasury benches: Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, Arun Jaitley and Pramod Mahajan, Arun Shourie and Sushma Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi and Venkaiah Naidu "" among others.

There will be businessmen like Anil Ambani and Lalit Suri, economists like Bimal Jalan, representatives from filmdom like Jaya Bachchan, former governors and administrators like P C Alexander, video camera victims like Dilip Singh Judev and floor-crossers like Najma Heptullah, high-powered party bosses like Mayawati....

The Congress will be able to field a good chunk of the Cabinet (other than the prime minister himself, the home minister, the education minister, the power minister and the law minister), people like Jairam Ramesh and Suresh Kalmadi, trusted aides of the party president like Ahmed Patel and Ambika Soni, Ghulam Nabi Azad and....

So is this the real Lok Sabha, while the other place with green carpets is in more ways than one the "lower" house? Or is this more like an elevated gathering of Page 3 lok? Or perhaps just an exclusive club of the great and the good (and the not-so-good)?

Perhaps it is all of these. So it is a pity that the newspapers have stopped covering parliamentary debates, indeed virtually stopped covering anything to do with Parliament other than the "zero hour" shouting, people "rushing to the well of the house", and the walk-outs.

It is impossible to believe that the kind of Rajya Sabha that we now have will not be an interesting place, that it will not be a battleground of competing ideas, and that it will not see clashes of words and personalities that are worth re-telling to a wider audience. If I had to be a fly on the wall in the new Parliament, I would want to be on the Rajya Sabha wall.

Since that is not possible, what is the solution? Why not our own version of C-Span, the American television channel that telecasts US Congress debates round the clock?

At the moment TV coverage of Parliament is confined mostly to question hour (and the coverage has helped improve the MPs' conduct, as well as made them upgrade sartorially!), and special occasions like the presentation of the Budget (so Budget speeches have doubled in length "" and there is always some moment in the speech when the minister sitting just behind the FM goes into a long yawn or simply dozes off). As for coverage of Rajya Sabha debates, it is non-existent.

It wouldn't cost too much to run such a channel. Satellite transponder costs have crashed, and could stay low because of excess supply. Programming costs are next to nil since the MPs provide it without extra charge.

There is no need for studios, no travel budget, not even any editing to be done of the raw footage since everything is to be telecast exactly as is.

All you need are a few strategically placed cameras, and someone at a console monitoring the screens and deciding which image will be beamed out. And of course an edict to the cable operators that carrying the signal is mandatory; they won't mind since there need not be any stipulation that the feed must be on a prime channel.

I can imagine a lot of people all over the country, and especially in the remoter regions, being quite interested in just such a channel and its content.

The number may not be big enough to figure in the TAM ratings, but that doesn't matter because the objective is not to garner advertising revenue. Which does not mean that the revenue possibilities are nil. You could charge other TV channels for feeds from parliamentary footage; you could even package highlights of the day "" but do it more intelligently and more interestingly than Doordarshan does.

And there may even be some advertising support. These will defray the cost somewhat, but that should not be the objective. If someone wants to see a duel between Manmohan Singh and Arun Shourie on privatisation, or between Bimal Jalan and Anil Ambani on the public sector, where else could one go? In the age of saturation TV, is this too much to ask?