No autonomy for DD

IT is time to end the Prasar Bharati charade and declare outright that the Government has no interest in implementing autonomy for its broadcaster. A few days after the earthquake which Doordarshan's main channel chose to ignore for the first few hours, Prasar Bharati's chief executive officer Rajeeva Ratna Shah found himself deprived of his post as well as of a new assignment. He was put on "compulsory wait," which is bureaucratic parlance for the doghouse.

Why did this happen? Because of DD's response to the earthquake? Because it was established that he did a favour to the production house associated with the son of former Information and Broadcasting minister Pramod Mahajan? Or was it because a new person was to take charge two days later as Secretary in the I and B ministry in which Mr. Shah was an additional secretary? This new person is apparently junior to R.R. Shah in the service and it might have been awkward to expect him to serve under him.

The point is, nobody who is outside the loop knows. In the allegedly autonomous corporation called Prasar Bharati, the Government can still turf out the top man without any explanations being offered. And of course the members of the P B Board were as clueless as anybody else. They heard about Mr. Shah's removal from the press.

As one of them said wryly though, the Government does not have to consult them. The full board is not in place, and Mr. Shah himself was an interim appointment until a CEO is selected by a designated selection committee, so the Government is within its rights to replace him with another interim appointment.

But the replacement is a temporary one, we are told. It so happens that the selection committee to choose a chairman, a CEO and some board members for Prasar Bharati has met only recently, and apparently some names were approved.

If a properly selected CEO is to be appointed soon, what was the hurry in removing Mr. Shah? And replacing him with a man from the Civil Aviation Ministry who knows nothing about this job, and is supposed to be an interim appointment any way?

This business of selecting the rest of the Board has been hanging fire for more than a year. The selection committee was named long ago, but has been dilly-dallying and asking for specious clarifications. When it finally does meet and consider a list of names, the Government gets rid of the incumbent and quickly makes an ad hoc appointment. How curious. Why did they not keep Mr. Shah in the job till a formal selection could be announced? That this Government takes a dim view of the idea of Prasar Bharati is no secret.

But then perhaps it is time to call a halt to the whole charade. Why have a board made up of eminent people from civil society who end up having no role, why waste money building offices for them (which is being done), and why continue implementing in letter an act which has been found wanting in terms of the structure it has devised for this autonomous corporation? When the National Front government was in power, Mr. Jaipal Reddy attempted to amend it to make some parts of the act workable. Mrs. Sushma Swaraj, as his successor, decided to let those amendments lapse.

In the few years that Prasar Bharati has muddled along, it has been found that the act is badly structured and wanting in many ways. There are no amendments on the anvil to remedy this situation. The way it is structured, the policy and implementation roles of the Board and CEO have been collapsed.

The CEO is part of both policy making and implementation in the existing structure, and he is more powerful than the part-time chairman and the part-time members. The Director Generals who should be executive heads of All India Radio and Doordarshan have not been appointed for years, so in situations like the current one there is no second rung of officers who can keep the show running while the new CEO learns his job.

Why have no DGs been appointed for so long? One reason is that all in-house contenders for the jobs have enquiries of various kinds pending against them. Isn't that charming?

The Shunu Sen committee had suggested several changes in the Prasar Bharati structure to make it workable. These have not been implemented. So you have a flawed structure prescribed by the Act, an incomplete board with no powers, and peremptory decision making by the government of the day which makes a mockery of even half-baked autonomy.

As a Board Member of the board-which- is-not-a-board puts it, "We are like the Cheshire Cat, but even the grin is slowly fading."

* * *

The Budget session of Parliament is scheduled to take up the Convergence Bill which will bring about legislation to cover broadcasting, telecommunication and Internet.

The broadcasting sector has now been waiting since 1997 to see whether the Government really means business where regulation is concerned. And the current situation whereby cable subscribers in different parts of the country find themselves deprived of some popular cable TV channels demonstrates that self-regulation is not an answer. The sooner clear-cut laws are put in place, the better.

As both Star TV and Zee expand their bouquets, carriage becomes an issue. As other players such as Aaj Tak and the regional channel bouquets of ETV and TARA enter the fray, it becomes a further issue. Whose channels will you carry on the prime band? And with the Zee-owned Siti-Cable being a major cable player, the question becomes, will you carry channels that are competition for your own?

It the past, the Government's only effort has been to ensure that there are must-carry clauses in any cable or broadcasting legislation to cover Doordarshan channels. But if the purpose of the legislation is to serve the interests of viewers, and not just those of the Government, there has to be appropriate must- carry regulation for competing private channels as well. In the draft Convergence Bill there is a clause which says "To formulate and determine conditions for fair, equitable and non- discriminatory access to a network facility or network service and provide for revenue sharing arrangements and other related matters thereof."

In the interest of consumers legislators in this country have to ensure that the rules written for this clause ensure that channels and cable providers are made to play fair, both in terms of pricing pay channels and in terms of carrying competitors.

Web Winner: Much has been written about the flood of websites triggered by the Gujarat earthquake. Indeed there were many of these energetically playing good Samaritans. But size, editorial competence and resources still matter most in providing a truly organised information service at times like this.

The panjokutch.com website, which gave village by village information was laudable, but updating all this was a problem. There was no situation update in the case of many villages for a week or more.

A lot of sites were excruciatingly slow to load. In terms of many-angled coverage, information that could be easily retrieved (as compared to TV and newspapers) and comprehensive links, Rediff on the Net won hands down. It rose handsomely to the occasion. l

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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