Doordarshan: From leading the roost to losing the plot

Ruby Dash - Televisionpoint.com | Mumbai
Gone are the glorious days of Doordarshan (DD) when every time the wheel turned with a melodramatic tune, people switched on their black and white TV sets to tune into shows like Hum Log, Buniyaad, Bharat Ek Khoj and Mahabharat. Televisionpoint.com points out why and how DD lost its hold over all the other private channels that raced ahead to capture eyeballs.

Lost Identity
On completing 50 years, DD - better known as the voice of the government - has lost its dominance, except in rural areas where the audience might not be able to afford the dish.

As they themselves define it, DD, a public service broadcaster, is among the largest terrestrial television networks in the world. The service was started in New Delhi on September 15, 1959, to transmit educational and development programmes on an experimental basis with half-an-hour of programming.

As Kelly Mistry, an old timer who has worked in DD for 20 years then moved on to Zee TV and now freelances, comments, "In the era of zero competition, there was no perception of choice. People viewing it were happy with what they got and so were the ones producing it."

"Even then there was no sense of quality, more about money exchanged under the table. They bought the best brands but did not value the people running the show, so those trained people went on to produce better products." Mistry says.

Names like Siddhartha Basu, Dheeraj Kumar, and Tony Singh still exist on the small screen that continue to make waves every time they produce some show. Many big names had moved to the small screen then, like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Vijay Tendulkar.

Memory Mettle
I still remember a friend who held on to her labour pains so that she could watch the particular episode of Mahabharat. Streets resembled curfew-like scenes when the historical serials of Ramayana, Mahabharat. and Chanakya were telecast. No doubt, the producers worked hard, the star cast was straight out of National School of Drama or excellent theatre artists.

The storylines were rich as those were the initial years. Hum Log, Buniyaad, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Pratham Pratishruti, Ek Kahani were anyway good scripts, so it didn't take much to carve out interesting serials. All the shows or serials that we remember are Paleolithic or were shown 25 years ago, when DD was ruling the roost all alone. The Gulf War came and changed it all.

In 1990, CNN positioned a satellite close to India and telecast the Gulf War live. Suddenly, audiences realised they could see a channel other than DD. Private entrepreneurs used Hong Kong as a base to start private television channels and beamed programmes airlifted from India to satellites positioned close to India. Private satellite television had arrived in India.

Wheel Turn
A regular television service as part of All India Radio commenced in Delhi in 1965; Mumbai in 1972; Kolkata and Chennai in 1975. DD was established formally 1976. In his book India on Television, Nalin Mehta mentions 21 gifted sets, which were installed in what were called 'tele-clubs', and an additional 50 gifted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Most of the programme formats were simple, and commentators followed the stiff upper lip rule. A major landmark thereafter was the introduction of colour television in 1982 coinciding with the 9th Asian Games held in New Delhi that ushered in a major revolution in broadcasting in the country.

After that, when they got a permanent viewership, they lost out in the rat race not because of their reach but quality, or as Vir Sanghvi once put it, "Privatise DD. Allow the private sector to run a channel with the programming values of Zee TV or Star Plus but with the reach of DD."

This was way back when Colors had not come on the scene and within a span of one year, taken away all the eyeballs and really shown the viewers what they wanted.

Media Conglomerate
The government managed to set up a mammoth media empire, with umpteen DD channels which do not get watched and by setting up an autonomous body like Prasar Bharati. All public money gone to sheer waste in electing and running a board which has no powers over anybody. Unlike the European countries, for instance BBC which has some degree of control over all other channels, ours follows the American model where everything is liberalised.

As Mistry points out, "Parents have the remote control and child lock facility. In case they feel certain programmes cross borders of obscenity ban them in your own homes, why control the nation?" Even then a show like Sach Ka Saamna has been pushed to 11 pm so viewers can watch it at their own free will, instead of raising unnecessary questions in Parliament.

Lose Plot
Tapan Panda, ex-director IIM, Indore and now president (marketing and corporate affairs) at Everonn Systems India Ltd, Chennai, puts it succinctly, "One needs to understand that sustained growth comes out of how broadly you define your business and how carefully you gauge your customer's needs. DD failed on both counts. It had a confusing positioning in the absence of competition as 'infotainment' channel.

While mega changes embracing Indian middle class psychographics demanded channels to be either 'entertainment' or 'information' oriented, DD continued the product mix which was irrelevant and out of context to the emerging social classes of urban India. The history of every decaying brand shows the self-deceiving cycle of geographic expansion and undetected decay. The idea of indispensability aided with product provincialism (remember ministers deciding which programme would go on air) only hastened the fall."

What Branding?
We remember only the old serials when most of us were growing up. What happened in between? Panda has a unique take on this, "It happens with all brands, as brand building takes time and it is related to mindshare.

Programmes like Hum Log, Buniyaad are talked about because they still exist at the top of the mind. Problem is when the category (here DD) is obsolete, what is the point in the brand (the programme) recall? It only gives nostalgic feelings to the viewer to find relevance to that generation.

Recall value is high because the audience found them meaningful and continues to do so. A brand gets a higher recall when there is something unique about the brand and there is a high degree of favourability with the associations.

Currently, there is no brand recall because there is no audience exposure." As Mistry asks, "Why keep DD alive?" Good question but dinosaurs did slowly disappear from the face of the earth to make way for other evolved beings.

Saas and the City
Even before Ekta Kapoor came with her particular brand of serials when the entire family sat and watched inane K-shows like Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kasautii Zindagi Kay in the '90s, DD had lost complete control. These were the days when only three channels ruled the roost, Star Plus, Sony and Zee and by the turn of the century there have been so many that all of us have lost count.

As Mistry recounts, "Soap operas or serials were relayed during the afternoons, when soap companies advertised and bored housewives watched, hence the name. Indian prime time is very different and has a different kind of audience."

News Run
After the 26/11 fiasco when news channels were playing detective, things have been streamlined for the next such crisis. That was when DD as usual did not sensationalise news, though there are very few people who actually watch it.

Pankaj Pachauri, managing editor, special projects, NDTV India, feels otherwise, "This is a complex scene. DD is suffering from a crisis of credibility. India has about 13 crore TV households, only half of these have cable and satellite."

"So DD still has a monopoly in half the TV households where only terrestrial TV is available. But during elections and crises, news channels are preferred more because people do not trust DD news, though less than 10 per cent TV watching population watch news channels on cable and satellite, the others watch entertainment and other channels." Pachauri says.

"So news channels have a limited impact on larger issues like elections. For instance, NDA's 'India Shining" campaign failed in 2004 elections. DD maybe out of reckoning among the chattering classes, it still has huge reach and cannot be written off totally." Pachauri adds.

Since the DD DG did not respond on time we couldn't get the official word defending the government body.

Fact or Fiction
Perceptions changed when Indira Gandhi became Information & Broadcasting Minister. She believed that television was a vitally important means of communication and pushed for its establishment on a regular footing. When she became PM in 1972, a television station came up in Bombay (now Mumbai), the second in the country, followed by stations in Jalandhar and Srinagar. Thereafter, in quick succession, stations opened in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Madras (now Chennai) and a few other cities.

For a long time, television remained an urban medium due to technical reasons. The television signal is a line-of-sight signal, that is, it travels in a straight line as light does. When the earth curves the signal does not and is thus lost beyond a particular point (around 75 kms from the transmitter, if one were to use the most powerful transmitter available).

Thus, those who had television sets in metropolitan cities and their suburbs could see programmes if they were within, say 60 km of the television transmitter, after which the signal got increasingly hazy until it disappeared.

Daily soaps started with serials like Shanti and Swabhimaan on DD, all focusing on the modern Indian housewife. Now where have we reached, we have more regressive serials like Balika Vadhu and Laado, which have gripped the viewers' imagination, especially women in the age-group of 6 to 60.

Rival Control
Long back, when protesters were burning up the city over the screening of the film, Fire, Pramod Mahajan dismissed comparisons with autonomy in the BBC, saying, "BBC is totally different. It has nothing to do with Prasar Bharati of today. This is a unique system we have developed over 30 years. No other country has an Information and Broadcasting Minister."

Recently, Bhaskar Ghose, former I&B secretary, wrote, "More and more private channels came up, more and more glitzy programmes fascinated audiences, and DD fell away from public gaze even though it still had large numbers watching its programmes. But these were often dull or melodramatic and mediocre in terms of quality as it virtually stopped making any of its own programmes and became little more than a rentier - renting airtime to private producers."

Ghose adds, "Its revenues looked impressive - some Rs 800 crore or so - but its expenses spiraled out of control, making it dependent on state grants. Even though it was then part of an 'autonomous' corporation, Prasar Bharati, it remained, in real terms, an appendage of the government. It could neither occupy the kind of dominant position enjoyed by public service broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC in the UK, NHK in Japan, SVT in Sweden, TF1 in France, ZDF and ARD in Germany or ABC in Australia, nor could it compete in the commercial world with private channels on their own flexible and often rather murky terms."

Mistry goes one step forward, saying, "Control has not proved successful in any model, be it banking or airlines. Finally, the viewer will decided which shows should be pulled off the tube. It's good that we are doing away with the license Raj."

Looking to the future, DD has to either change skin or dissolve into oblivion while other channels race ahead with their TRPs.

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