Society

Recasting Ouch

A new team leads the DD revamp, leaving the old guard fuming

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Recasting Ouch
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What do you do if you are a public service broadcaster and elections are just around the corner? You rejig your news channel and hope that your constituency—that inscrutable mass that is the voters—will notice the good work of the government. Back in 2004, the BJP-led NDA had done it. Cut to 2013, the Congress-led UPA is doing the same, though the scale of the revamp is much more modest. The BJP put up a whole new team in place, with spiffy anchors hired from rival news channels and having on its rolls those close to the political dispensation. But it lost the election in 2004 and the news team disappeared into the studios of other news and current affairs channels.

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Yet again, DD is waking up to the competition, and elections. For the time being, the current rejig is being confined to the prime band between eight and 10.30 pm. The advertisements have already begun in right earnest, exhorting viewers all of last week to tune into News Night—a current affairs programme in Hindi and English which made a low-key debut on January 28. Sources say close to Rs 4 crore have alr­eady been spent on the advertising.

But the ads themselves are causing much heartburn. Highlighting only the new faces in the prime band, the faceless anchors who have worked over the years to build and work the channel resent that they continue to remain faceless while the newer anchors get fat paychecks and instant promotion and recognition. People are also asking if DD News shouldn’t be advertised alongside the new programme, since the entire channel is being revamped and at the former’s expense.

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Quite typically, the ads (which are not by DAVP) say, ‘Watch News Night’ with hosts Ajay Shukla or Sanjeev Srivastava. Srivastava, an old BBC hand, is leading the new team of eight. As for Shukla, DD viewers may recall his association with NDTV. Srivastava defe­nds the adv­ertising for the new channel, saying that a new product needs advertising. “It does seem like a channel within a channel, but it is not so.”

However, the favoured treatment being meted out to the new channel and faces continues to attract criticism. Eyebrows are being raised at Shukla’s very appointment, given that he is the brother-in-law of part-time Prasar Bharati Board member, Suman Dubey, considered one of the closest insiders in the Gandhi family circle. Prasar Bharati chairperson Mrinal Pande, however, rationalises that Dubey excu­sed himself from the decision-making, citing conflict of interest.

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Even with its CEOs, DD has always attracted the criticism that they are drawn from among those perceived to be close to the ruling dispensation. It is the same with incumbent CEO Jawhar Sircar, who came in a little over a year ago and who sources say is keen on the Doordarshan revamping project. In fact, so enthusiastic is the gentleman that he apparently shoots off mails to colleagues, directing them to apportion some airtime to him—as he moves from one public engagement to another!

All the criticism notwithstanding, the people behind the revamp are gung-ho about the exercise. “It was the Prasar Bharati Board’s decision to revamp Doordarshan,” says Pande. “We took the decision a few months ago and the ministry supported us. We went completely by the rulebook, and as an entire revamp is being planned, we thought it best to begin with DD News.”

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Pande also said the committee under Sam Pitroda was currently in the process of finalising a report on the revamp which the board would subsequently take up. It is the fourth such committee to have been established to suggest ways to restructure the corporation. The committee has a further 11 subcommittees, and there are over 26,000 employees on the rolls. Which leads to the next bone of contention. With an entire cadre of Information Service officials who have traditionally served Doordarshan, All India Radio and the Press Information Bureau, why hire outsiders on salaries that are denied to homegrown staffers? Especially if its ad line boasts ‘DD News, biggest network and biggest reach’. “We work through the year, and suddenly the board and the ministry decide to appoint some old faces from private channels who have been ignored by their own channels and are out of a job,” one such officer complains.

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What is also being resented is that the UPA chose to do nothing in the last eight years and has all of a sudden decided on a revamp one year away from the election. “This is the bane of the corporation: a new team is set up and then dismantled when the party in power loses,” says a corporation official.

The ministry pleads the pressure of competition as the impulse behind the revamp. “Large-scale urbanisation has brought with it the pressure to compete,” says an official from the ministry. “And overall improvement is being worked out for the entire Prasar Bharati corporation.” “As a news channel,” adds another source, “you have to make an attempt to stay relevant and a search committee had already decided to rev­amp Doordarshan and air.”

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As chairman of the corporation, Mrinal Pande cannot agree more. The time has clearly come to professionalise the entire set-up. As for all the criticism, her response is, “Whenever there is a revamp, some quarters do get unnecessarily alarmed.”

There is no disputing the sway DD News holds in vast swathes of the country. While private news channels have to dig into TRPs and trumpet over who occ­upies the number one position, DD News has a faithful audience in those who come out in large numbers to vote. Of course, being government-run, it has often ingratiated itself to the powers that be. For instance, just at the beginning of the Budget session of Parliament, it aired a programme featuring Union minister of information and broadcasting Manish Tewary and BJP member Rajiv Pratap Rudy on a panel discussing the role of the public service broadcaster. “The programme was aired thrice.”

To be fair to the channel, though, it had a programme following the hanging of Afzal Guru, in the process annoying some hawks. They accused it of becoming a “Pakistani” channel because it had on its panel guests who were critical of the hanging. According to sources, DD’s Srinagar Kendra cautioned officials that Doordashan was sending a wrong signal in the Valley by putting out a separatist agenda!

This may be more of an exception  than a rule, and for DD it pays to toe the government line, literally. The government agreed in September last year to meet the 100 per cent salary requirement of the corporation’s employees for the next five years. It would, however, have to meet its operational costs, that is, raise its own revenues. Is this the way out for a public service broadcaster?

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