The uninformed clamour of outrage that greeted a still speculative report that government is considering a television licence fee to fund Doordarshan, the public service broadcaster (PSB), is instructive and saddening. When will they ever learn?

The proposal, as reported, is that an annual Rs 500 and Rs 200 licence fee be levied on colour and B&W TV sets respectively to support DD. Additionally, there was mention of a further levy on the purchase price of TV sets. The question posed in fevered TV discussions were whether it was fair to tax the viewer and manufacturer to subsidise an “inefficient” and unaccountable official trumpet like DD. Instant TV polls via SMS damned the idea in no uncertain terms. QED - Is that truly so?

For a start there was a misjoinder of principle and modalities. Broadcast licence fees are common enough worldwide, witness the Prasar Bharti Act, the BBC and other systems. An earlier Indian scheme failed because small sums had to be paid annually by way of radio and TV licence fees at particular post offices. The sheer labour and harassment made for widespread evasion and collection costs ate away much of the revenue.

The Akash Bharati Committee (1978) and everybody since has suggested a simple, prospective, non-evasive one time licence fee equivalent to, say, 10 per cent of the purchase price, at the time and point of purchase but only on colour sets, so as to exempt poorer households. No separate charge should be levied on manufacturers and the system would operate like the one-time collection of road tax on automobiles. There should be radio licensing as well, exempting single band transistors but not car radios.

The purpose would be to fund Prasar Bharti (PB) in a somewhat painless manner in a bid to bolster its autonomy by according it a measure of financial viability together with programme revenues, product sales and returns from advertising. All instructional, community development and social or empowerment programming (relating to schools, open learning, public health, farm extension, social awareness building), and government-mandated and external broadcasts should be paid for by the state(s) or relevant public agencies. The norms could be fixed after due public discussion and PSB made accountable to parliament and an independent complaints and standards commission (as envisaged) without being a handmaiden of the government.

Unfortunately the scheme was scuttled. Money earned by PB goes to the consolidated fund; personnel remain government servants (in violation of the PB Act); finances and reporting requirements are controlled through the I&B Ministry, which mistakenly believes that it (not PB) is accountable to parliament and therefore PB is accountable to it. The Board of PB has by dereliction and default seldom been fully constituted since 1997 and key personnel like DGs and finance and personnel directors are preferentially selected from among government officials. PB has remained a pompous signboard without autonomy and afraid to exercise it, with too much kow-towing to the powers that be. The I&B Ministry, parliament, advertisers, the entertainment world, private broadcasters, cable operators, and most of the public have not been supportive of the very idea of PSB. 

The concept of PSB has simply not been understood, let alone fairly tried, and a mutilated creature is tauntingly asked why it has not worked and whether it deserves to live at all when burgeoning, thriving, innovating private channels can do the job. The private channels are market driven and work for the consumer. The public service broadcaster, per contra, is intended to serve the citizen in a situation where around half the population hovers around or lives below the poverty line, outside the market. Broadcasting is surely more than glitzy entertainment, spectacles and the breathless babble of “breaking news”. These cannot crowd out programmes that empower millions of marginalised, made in their multifarious languages, idiom and locales. Who is to cater to them? They are information-needy and require a ready PSB medium (TV and radio) that can make them biologic partners in development, growth and governance and consumers of knowledge as much as of goods, services and entitlements. PSB, well run, could be a most immediate source of information, access to and participation in life’s unfolding opportunities, and a mechanism of grievance redressal. Very little of this is “commercial” and will not earn rating points to win advertising.

Who has given any of this a thought or its net gain to GDP, the unity and stability of our extraordinarily diverse and upwardly mobile country, its cultural enrichment and the well being and happiness of the forgotten “we” who constitute the bulk of “the people”? Radio has been crassly neglected and local and community radio crippled. Only a fool would suggest that PSB is a panacea or magic wand. Equally, only the callously unthinking can rest with the thought that we can disdain an obvious, cost-effective option to speed the country on its way. Not to fund PSB is almost like abandoning universal education to the market. President Kalam got it right: the media must be for a billion people.