Dumb dumb dumbing down

With millions of illiterate young desperately wanting to read and write, the small, elitist commercial media won’t be able to dominate the diverse and plural environment in India

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta Delhi

We in India would not be able to describe ourselves as belonging to the world’s largest democracy were it not for the existence of an independent media. Although large sections of the corporate media in the country have become crassly commercial, focussing almost entirely on enhancing advertising revenues and catering to small, wealthy and influential elites, the big picture of the media landscape is not uniformly bleak. Even as much of the mainstream media in India dumbs down its readers, listeners and viewers, a narrow segment still believes that although journalism may no longer be a mission (but a location like any other), it is still possible for newspapers, magazines, books, radio, television, documentary and feature films to not just entertain and inform but also educate and empower.

The media in India is unique in more ways than one. The approach paper to the Eleventh Five Year Plan, that starts on April 1, 2007, points out that “one of the sectors which has consistently outperformed” the rate of growth of gross domestic product in India is the “entertainment and media services sector”. This sector is expected to grow at a compound average annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19 per cent till the year 2010 and beyond, or twice as fast as the rest of the economy. The approach paper has put out estimates of the growth rates of different media. The fastest yearly growth would be recorded by television (42 per cent), followed by print (31 per cent), films (19 per cent), advertising (3 per cent), music and live entertainment (2 per cent) and radio (1 per cent).

The Planning Commission document has not provided the basis for making these estimates. Many could argue that some of these projections are rather conservative — particularly the one relating to radio listening. Still, the approach paper points out, media is one sector where “demand grows faster than income”. It adds that not only can the high growth rate be expected to continue but also that “the ‘convergence’ of all forms of media to a common digital form, along with technological breakthroughs, provides scope for even higher growth”.

Over the past decade and a half, the print medium in most developed countries has been facing tough competition from TV and, more recently, from the internet. A number of surveys have indicated that the paid circulation of newspapers has been declining by a proportion varying between two per cent and four per cent, virtually each year over the last five years, in countries located in North America and Europe. In quite a few developed countries, the number of people who listen to the radio on any given day has reached a plateau or even come down. However, in these countries, the number of users of the internet has gone up quite dramatically and is continuing to rise. Even faster than the rate of growth of the internet has been the sale of video games in many economically advanced countries.

In India, the media environment has been — and is certainly going to remain — quite different. All media — print, radio, TV, cinema and the internet — have been growing and are expected to grow each year, although some would obviously grow faster than the others. Other developing countries too are witnessing similar trends.

Unlike in the West, radio is among the expanding media in India, although, ironically, India is the only democracy in the world where news and current affairs programmes on the radio still remain a monopoly of the government-owned broadcaster, All India Radio. Over the coming three years, that is, till 2009, from barely two dozen FM (frequency modulation) radio stations in the country in July-August 2006, this number is expected to jump to more than 300, with several corporates already  jumping into the fare. This should not seem surprising if one considers the fact that a small and less economically developed country like Nepal has had over 50 FM radio stations, including several socially committed, non-commercial community radio stations, for quite a few years now.

The circulation of newspapers and magazines is also on the rise in India. The print medium is certain to grow because one out of three Indians is officially illiterate, in the sense that they cannot write their own names and use thumb impressions on official documents. As literacy spreads, more publications would come up and existing ones would expand. At present, close to 60,000 publications are registered with the Registrar of Newspapers of India, including 1,900-odd dailies.

The Planning Commission’s paper quoted earlier points out that only 75 per cent of the male population and 54 per cent of the female population in the country is literate. The government hopes that the drop-out rate of children from primary school would come down from around 52 per cent at present (the highest in Asia) to around 20 per cent by 2012, by which year the literacy level would have gone up to 85 per cent. Even if these targets are not met, it is clear that the print medium in India would continue to grow — for a neo-literate, the ability to read a publication is a major source of empowerment.

India’s experience with TV remains unique; this is the only country in the world with more than three dozen 24-hour TV channels broadcasting programmes on news and current affairs, barely a quarter-century after the world’s first 24-hour TV news channel (CNN or Cable News Network) came up in 1980. Till 1991, television viewers in India could view only the channels broadcast by Doordarshan, and Zee News, the first private news channel, started in 1984. Currently, India is the only country in the world where a cable TV subscriber can, for an amount varying between the equivalent of $2 and $6, receive anywhere from 30 to over 100 channels, most of them in languages that she or he is unable to understand.

Till the end of July 2006, the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting had allowed 185 private satellite channels to be uplinked from India and 65 channels had been allowed to officially downlink in India. The cinema industry in India continues to remain prolific, producing roughly 800 feature films a year. It is in this larger context that the role of the newest of the electronic media, the only medium that combines mass communication with interpersonal communication, namely, the internet or the world-wide-web, should be looked at.

Whereas there is more than one TV set for every 10 Indians and one mobile phone for every 10 citizens, there are less than two personal computers for every 100 Indians. These statistics indicate the long distance that has to be covered before the internet as a medium makes a discernible impact on Indian society. Whereas the expansion of the ‘old’ media has gone beyond urban areas and is fast spreading across the length and breadth of rural India, the growth of the new media has become dependent on technology penetration and the development of the telecommunications infrastructure.

India’s telecom sector has expanded at an incredibly rapid pace in recent years: the number of fixed and wireless telephone connections has doubled between the middle of 2004 and mid-2006 to exceed 150 million. On an average, five million new mobile phone connections were being added each month in 2006 and India is currently enjoying the lowest call rates anywhere in the world. The spread of telecom facilities has, however, been rather uneven.

In early-2006, while there were 40 phones for every 100 residents of cities like Delhi and Mumbai (the proportion was at an even higher 60 in Chennai), the teledensity levels in states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam and Orissa stood at a pathetic two or three. The whole of rural India too had barely two telephones for every 100 individuals. In the 600,000 villages in the country, whereas all but 50,000-odd villages had at least one phone (at the end of 2005), at any point of time, between a quarter to a third of the phones tend to be out of order.

True, these numbers are changing rapidly. The government claims that there would not only be an electricity connection in each village by 2009 and a telephone line by November 2007, it is aiming for broadband connectivity in each village by 2011-12.

Despite its skewed pattern, the phenomenal expansion of India’s telecom infrastructure has led many analysts to contend that the new medium of the internet could actually bridge the gap between the country’s classes and its masses. How realistic such an expectation is, remains to be seen.

A quarter of the population of India, or more than 250 million people, continue to live below the internationally defined poverty line of dollar a day (worth roughly Rs 45). Availability of clean drinking water, sanitation and housing remain major problems for substantial sections of the population, and under such circumstances the potential of the media to expand faster would remain constricted even if one accepts the Planning Commission’s view that this is one sector whose demand growth cannot be directly linked to income growth.

At present, the overwhelming majority of the users of the internet in India is not merely educated but also belongs to the social elite that speak, read, write and think in English. There have been apprehensions that the use of internet, far from bridging the digital divide, may actually widen the information gap between the rich and the poor. Since access to information implies access to power in society, the digital divide may widen the economic gap between the haves and have-nots in India’s deeply-divided and highly-hierarchical society.

There is, however, a contrary point of view. Public access to the internet is becoming relatively easy through cyber cafes, community centres and educational institutions. Many government schools in cities now offer computer science as a subject. At the same time, the traditional media is expanding even as the print and electronic media are impacted by the internet. The power and potential of the media for not just disseminating information but also imparting knowledge would grow.

These countervailing forces within the media are clashing and will continue to clash in the years ahead. The more powerful sections would remain concerned only about their narrow constituencies as short-term profits are sought to be maximised. But I am hopeful that the corporate, commercial media in India would not be able to dominate the entire diverse and plural media environment in the country.