It enfeebles industry and lures it onto the rock of disaster, says Sudhir Mulji
Now that the government has turned its attention to setting up an information technology ministry, I suppose we must expect the steady strangulation and eventual demise of the information technology industry. This may sound somewhat cynical but the evidence is too strong to be ignored. We have a ministry for tourism but few tourists; a ministry for civil aviation, but are badly served by international air services. A ministry for steel and heavy industries that presides over a steel industry that is suffering spectacular losses. A ministry for mines that makes policy for a defunct coal industry; a ministry for petroleum that is so opaque in its policies, with subsidies, cross subsidies, taxes, oil pool deficits that it would need an astute observer to work out who benefits from it.
In the same vein we have a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting with policies so irrational that they defy description. First there was only Doordarshan providing us with government-guided programmes that must have been the most boring programmes the world had ever seen. When viewers could no longer stomach that fare we suddenly had a burst of new foreign programmes beamed to us through cable or whatever modern technology could beam. This apparently was acceptable to the authorities.
But foreign investment in the print media continues to be banned by directive principles or guidelines that were formulated in 1956. The self-evident contradictions in the treatment of "foreign influence" in two different media should be obvious to the meanest intellect. So should the consequences of the government's absurd policies. On the one hand the Indian television industry competes and thrives against the onslaught of foreign television while on the other hand, as pointed out by your editor in an admirable article, the print media is riddled with losses.<
