Why Prasar Bharati
No point in spending public money if it cannot run independently
The state-controlled broadcaster, Prasar Bharati, is in the midst of a crisis. Recent events seem to suggest strongly that something in the nature of a power struggle is taking place between the Prasar Bharati board and the Union ministry of information and broadcasting. True, this is hardly an evenly matched battle: Prasar Bharati and the channels it supervises are technically independent of the Union government even though this is not the public perception. However tentative, past steps towards independence or at least greater autonomy have been welcome; the authority delegated to the board under the Prasar Bharati Act was one such. The board last week, in a surprising and defiant declaration, claimed that it “took strong exception” to a direction from the information and broadcasting ministry that ordered it to dispense with the services of every contract employee at Doordarshan and All India Radio.
Other issues that sparked the board’s defiance included the appointment of a new member of the board who was a serving officer of the Indian Administrative Service or IAS. The seat the IAS officer was nominated to fill, that of member (personnel), is actually supposed to be filled by an employee of Prasar Bharati identified through a formal search process under a committee led by the vice-president. The board argued that nominating a serving bureaucrat was an open violation of the Prasar Bharati Act. The ministry also ordered that channels on the Doordarshan Free Dish service should no longer be auctioned. Such auctions bring in ~300 crore, and the board was of the view that ending auctions would “wreck” Prasar Bharati’s finances. The government wants these channels instead to be handed to other ministries to run as they see fit; evidently the current number of state-owned channels is not enough, and there must be as many as there are ministries. The final flashpoint was the ministry’s proposal that two particular journalists be hired at salaries considerably in excess of those currently being paid.
One purpose of a public broadcaster is to raise the tone of news reporting, to provide reliable information that reaches all parts of the country. It is unclear if Prasar Bharati is fulfilling this purpose as its role has largely been limited to looking after the interest of the ruling regime at the Centre. For example, it refused to air Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar’s Independence Day address last year unless it was “reshaped”. As such, the question that the government should ask itself is this: why bother with Prasar Bharati anyway? Why maintain the charade and spend public funds — over ~28 billion in the last Union Budget — on a largely ineffective outlet? Prasar Bharati no longer has a reason to exist — not as a government propaganda outlet, at any rate. If that is a difficult decision, the only other real option is for the Union government and the I&B ministry to decide if they really believe in Prasar Bharati’s stated mission and let the board run the entity as it wants.