The Indian television system is one of the most extensive systems in the world. Terrestrial broadcasting, which has been the sole preserve of the government, provides television coverage to over 90% of India's 900 million people. By the end of 1996 nearly 50 million households had television sets. International satellite broadcasting, introduced in 1991, has swept across the country because of the rapid proliferation of small scale cable systems. By the end of 1996, Indians could view dozens of foreign and local channels and the competition for audiences and advertising revenues was one of the hottest in the world. In 1995, the Indian Supreme Court held that the government's monopoly over broadcasting was unconstitutional, setting the stage for India to develop into one of the world's largest and most competitive television environments.

Broadcasting began in India with the formation of a private radio service in Madras in 1924. In the same year, the British colonial government granted a license to a private company, the Indian Broadcasting Company, to open Radio stations in Bombay and Calcutta. The company went bankrupt in 1930 but the colonial government took over the two transmitters and the Department of Labor and Industries started operating them as the Indian State Broadcasting Corporation. In 1936, the Corporation was renamed All India Radio (AIR) and placed under the Department of Communications. When India became independent in 1947, AIR was made a separate Department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The early history of radio broadcasting in independent India is important because it set the parameters for the subsequent role of television in the country. At Independence, the Congress government under Jawaharlal Nehru had three major goals: to achieve political integration, economic development and social modernization. Broadcasting was expected to play an important role in all three areas.

The most important challenge the government faced at independence was that of forging a nation out of the diverse political, religious, geographic and lingual entities that composed independent India. In addition to the territories ruled directly by the British, over 500 hundred "independent" princely states had joined the new nation, some quite reluctantly. The country immediately found itself at war with Pakistan over one of those states--Kashmir. The trauma of the partition of the country into India and Pakistan and the violence between Hindus and Muslims had further weekend the political stability of the country.

Broadcasting was harnessed for the task of political nation building. National integration and the development of a "national consciousness" were among the early objectives of All India Radio. Broadcasting was organized as the sole preserve of the chief architect of this process of political integration--the State. The task of broadcasting was to help in overcoming the immediate crisis of political instability that followed Independence and to foster the long-term process of political modernization and nation building that was the dominant ideology of the newly formed state. Broadcasting was also charged with the task of aiding in the process of economic development. The Indian Constitution, adopted in 1950, mandated a strong role for the Indian State in the economic development of the country. The use of broadcasting to further the development process was a natural corollary to this state-led developmental philosophy. Broadcasting, was especially expected to contribute to the process of social modernization, which was considered an important pre-requisite of economic development. The dominant development philosophy of the time identified the problems of development as primarily internal to developing countries. These endogenous causes, to which communication solutions were thought to exist, included traditional value systems, lack of innovation, lack of entrepreneurial ability and lack of a national consciousness. In short, the problem was one of old ideas hindering the process of social change and modernization and the role of broadcasting was to provide an inlet for the flow of modern ideas.

It was in the context of this dominant thinking about the role of broadcasting in India that television was introduced in 1959. The government had been reluctant to invest in television until then because it was felt that a poor country like India could not afford the medium. Television had to prove its role in the development process before it could gain a foot-hold in the country. Television broadcasts started from Delhi in September 1959 as part of All India Radio's services. Programs were broadcast twice a week for an hour a day on such topics as community health, citizens duties and rights, and traffic and road sense. In 1961 the broadcasts were expanded to include a school educational television project. In time, Indian films and programs consisting of compilation of musicals from Indian films joined the program line-up as the first entertainment programs. A limited number of old U.S. and British shows were also telecast sporadically.

The first major expansion of television in India began in 1972, when a second television station was opened in Bombay. This was followed by stations in Srinagar and Amritsar (1973), and Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow in 1975. Relay stations were also set up in a number of cities to extend the coverage of the regional stations. In 1975, the government carried out the first test of the possibilities of satellite based television through the SITE program. SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) was designed to test whether satellite based television services could play a role in socio-economic development. Using a U.S. ATS-6 satellite and up-link centers at Ahmedabad and Delhi, television programs were beamed down for about 4 hours a day to about 2,400 villages in 6 states. The programs dealt mainly with in- and out-of-school education, agricultural issues, planning and national integration. The program was fairly successful in demonstrating the effectiveness of satellite based television in India and the lessons learnt from SITE were used by the government in designing and utilizing its own domestic satellite service INSAT, launched in 1982.

In these early years television, like radio, was considered a facilitator of the development process and its introduction was justified by the role it was asked to play in social and economic development. Television was institutionalized as an arm of the government, since the government was the chief architect of political, economic and social development in the country.

By 1976, the government found itself running a television network of eight television stations covering a population of 45 million spread over 75,000 square kilometers. Faced with the difficulty of administering such an extensive television system television as part of All India Radio, the government constituted Doordarshan, the national television network, as a separate Department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Doordarshan was set up as an attached office under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting--a half-way house between a public corporation and a government department. In practice, however, Doordarshan operated much like a government department, at least as far as critical issues of policy planning and financial decision-making were concerned. Doordarshan was headed by a Director General appointed by the I and B Ministry. The Ministry itself and sometimes the office of the Director General as well, was and continues to be, staffed by members of India's civil services.

In 1982 television began to attain national coverage and develop as the government's pre-eminent media organization. Two events triggered the rapid growth of television that year. INSAT-1A, the first of the country's domestic communications satellites became operational and made possible the networking of all of Doordarshan's regional stations. For the first time Doordarshan originated a nation-wide feed dubbed the "National Programme" which was fed from Delhi to the other stations. In November 1982, the country hosted the Asian Games and the government introduced color broadcasts for the coverage of the games. To increase television's reach, the government launched a crash program to set up low and high power transmitters that would pick-up the satellite distributed signals and re-transmit them to surrounding areas. In 1983 television signals were available to just 28% of the population, this had doubled by the end of 1985 and by 1990 over 90% of the population had access to television signals.

1976 witnessed a significant event in the history of Indian television, the advent of advertising on Doordarshan. Until that time television had been funded through a combination of television licenses and allocations from the annual budget (licenses were later abolished as advertising revenues began to increase substantially). Advertising began in a very small way with under 1% of Doordarshan's budget coming from advertising revenues in 1976-77. But the possibility of reaching a nation wide audience made television look increasingly attractive to advertisers after the introduction of the "National Programme" in 1982. In turn, Doordarshan began to shift the balance of its programming from educational and informational programs to entertainment programs. The commercialization of Doordarshan saw the development of soap operas, situation comedies, dramas, musical programs, quiz shows and the like. By 1990 Doordarshan's revenues from advertising were about $300 million, accounting for about 70% of its annual expenditure.

By 1991, Doordarshan's earlier mandate to aid in the process of social and economic development had clearly been diluted. Entertainment and commercial programs had begun to take center stage in the organization's programming strategies and advertising had come to be Doordarshan's main source of funding. However, television in India was still a modest enterprise with most parts of the country getting just one channel except for the major cities which received two channels. But 1991 saw the beginnings of international satellite broadcasting in India and the government launched a major economic liberalization program. Both these events combined to change the country's television environment dramatically.

International satellite television was introduced in India by CNN through its coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. Three months later Hong Kong based StarTV (now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.) started broadcasting five channels into India using the ASIASAT-1 satellite. By early 1992, nearly half a million Indian households were receiving StarTV telecasts. A year later the figure was close to 2 million and by the end of 1994, an estimated 12 million households (a little less than one-fourth of all television households) were receiving satellite channels. This increase in viewership was made possible by the 60,000 or so small scale cable system operators who have mushroomed across the country. These systems have redistributed the satellite channels to their customers at rates as low as $5 a month. Taking advantage of the growth of the satellite television audience, a number of Indian satellite based television services were launched between 1991 and 1994, prominent among them ZeeTV, the first Hindi satellite channel. By the end of 1994 there were 12 satellite based channels available in India, all of them using a handful of different satellites. This number was expected to double by the end of 1996, with a number of Indian programmers and international media companies like Turner Broadcasting, Time-Warner, ESPN, CANAL 5 and Pearsons PLC, seriously considering the introduction of new satellite television services for India.

The proliferation of channels has put great pressure on the Indian television programming industry. Already the largest producer of motion pictures, India is poised to become a sizable producer of television programs as well. With Indian audiences clearly preferring locally produced program over foreign programs, the new television services are spending heavily on the development of indigenous programs. The number of hours of television programming produced in India has increased 500% from 1991 to 1996 and is expected to grow at an ever faster rate until the year 2000.

Despite the rapid growth of television channels from 1991 to 1996, television programming continues to be dominated by the Indian film industry. Hindi films are the staple of most national channels and regional channels rely heavily on a mix of Hindi and regional language films to attract audiences. Almost all Indian films are musicals and this allows for the development of inexpensive derivative programs. One of Doordarshan's most popular programs, Chitrahaar, is a compilation of old film songs and all the private channels, including ZeeTV and music video channels like MTV Asia and Channel V, show some variation of Chitrahaar. A number of game shows are also based on movie themes. Other genres like soap operas, talk shows and situation comedies are also gaining in popularity, but the production of these programs has been unable to keep up with demand, hence the continuing reliance on film based programming.

International satellite programming has opened up competition in news and public affairs programming with BBC and CNN International challenging Doordarshan's long standing monopoly. Most of the other foreign broadcasters, for example, ESPN and the Discovery Channel, are focusing on special interest programming. Only StarTV's STAR Plus channel offers broad-based English language entertainment programs. Most of its programs are syndicated U.S. shows, for example soap operas like The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara and talk shows like Donahue and Oprah. However, STAR Plus has a very small share of the audience in India and even this is threatened by the launch of new channels.

A peculiar development in television programming in India has been the use of hybrid English-Hindi program formats, popularly called "Hinglish" formats, which offer programs in Hindi and English on the same channel and even have programs, including news shows, that use both languages within a single telecast. This takes advantage of the of the audience for television (especially the audience for satellite television) which is largely composed of middle class Indians who have some knowledge of English along with Hindi and colloquially speak a language that is primarily Hindi intermixed with words, phrases and whole sentences in English.

Commercial competition has transformed Doordarshan as well and it is scrambling to cope with the changed competitive environment. Satellite broadcasting has threatened Doordarshan's audiences and self-preservation has spawned a new ideology in the network which is in the process of reinventing itself, co-opting private programmers to recapture viewers and advertising rupees lost to ZeeTV and StarTV. In 1994, the government ordered Doordarshan to raise its own revenues for future expansion. This new commercial mandate has gradually begun to change Doordarshan's perception of who are its primary constituents--from politicians to advertisers.

The government's monopoly over television over the years has resulted in Doordarshan being tightly controlled by successive governments. In principle, Doordarshan is answerable only to Parliament. Parliament lays down the guidelines that Doordarshan is expected to adhere to in its programming and Doordarshan's budget is debated and approved by Parliament. But the guidelines established by Parliament to ensure Doordarshan's political neutrality are largely ignored in the face of the majority that ruling parties have held in Parliament. Doordarshan has been subject more to the will of the government than the oversight of Parliament. Successive governments and ruling political parties have used Doordarshan to further their political agendas, weakening its credibility as an neutral participant in the political process. There have been periodic attempts to reconstitute Doordarshan into a BBC-like public corporation, but governments have been reluctant to relinquish their hold on such a powerful medium.

The government drew its right to operate the country's broadcasting services as a monopoly from the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 which empowers the government with the exclusive right to "establish, maintain and work" wireless services. In addition, the Constitution lists broadcasting as the sole domain of Parliament, effectively shutting out the states from making any laws with regard to television. Within the ambit of these provision it was assumed that media autonomy or liberalization in any form was the prerogative of the government to grant. But the government's monopoly was challenged in the Indian Supreme Court in 1995. The Court held that the government monopoly over broadcasting was unconstitutional and while the government has the right to regulate broadcasting in the public interest, the Constitution forbids monopoly control over any medium by either individuals or the government. The Court directed the government to establish an independent public authority for "controlling and regulating" the use of airwaves. The Court's decision holds out the promise of significant structural changes in Indian broadcasting and the possibility that terrestrial television may finally free itself from governmental control.

It is evident that over time the State's control over television will continue to diminish. As its revenue structure begins to change and Doordarshan begins to respond to increasing commercial pressures, the character of its programming will begin to increasingly reflect the demands and pressures of the market place. In the meantime, caught between the government and the market, Doordarshan continues to struggle to maintain its mandate of public service programming. But the Supreme Court's recent decision ordering the government to establish an independent broadcasting authority to regulate television in the public interest holds the promise of allowing Indian television to escape both the stifling political control of the state and the commercial pressures of the market. There are a number of other constituencies like state governments, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations and social service agencies who can participate in a liberalized broadcast system. The Supreme Court has provided an opportunity to develop a broad based television system. How the country responds to this opportunity in the next few years will determine the future of broadcasting in India in the next century.

-Nikhil Sinha