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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Switched off channels, stranded students
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Switched off channels, stranded students

The HRD ministry wants to start 50 more educational channels, but will somebody first put the existing education channels back on air?

Human resource development minister Smriti Irani. Photo: Hindustan TimesPremium
Human resource development minister Smriti Irani. Photo: Hindustan Times

Education is worth covering for the Delhi-based national media only when it has a clear, local, people-like-us (PLU) dimension to it. Or when it has a minister whose picture can be used to draw attention to any otherwise non-saleable education-related story.

So the travails of Delhi’s four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) are covered day after day, as is Smriti Irani, the human resource development minister. Her pronouncements for the most part have had a PLU angle to them. Ratings for universities, bringing in foreign varsities, and of course, FYUP. When she goes to rural schools as she did in Gujarat, it is only reported locally.

Even if she has taken notice of the four educational broadcasting channels that went off the air earlier this month, it hasn’t been reported. She holds forth about the 50 new education channels her ministry is going to launch, but we don’t know if she even knows about the four. Two Gyandarshan channels run by Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), and two others run by Indian Institutes of Technology and the University Grants Commission were switched off the satellite they were on by the Indian Space Research Organisation, leaving some 3 million plus registered open university students and lakhs of school students without the 24-hour education telecasts and radio programmes they have been receiving since 2000.

Only the Times of India bothered to write about it. And nobody has even picked up from it. Delhi’s 200,000 college aspirants and the tiny subset of that which aspires’s to admission in St Stephen’s College are what count in our media universe. A fifth of all students enrolled in higher education study through open learning institutions; they are the faceless millions doing correspondence courses. They learn out of their homes and the closest they would get to supplementary curricular material are the Gyandarshan and Gyanvani telecasts and broadcasts. (the latter is a radio channel accessible over DTH to those who get Gyandarshan1.) Gyandarshan1 was a must carry channel for every TV platform in the country, cable or DTH, until it disappeared from all platforms on 4 June.

These students also had access to the two channels produced by UGC and the IITs. These are on online platforms as well, so the loss isn’t much when the TV channel is off the air for students with proper Internet access.The Gyandarshan and Gyanvani clientele though are second-class citizens likely to have Internet access only through their mobiles, which is hardly great for watching educational telecasts. The reason why these channels suddenly disappeared is essentially because one arm of government did not pay the other, and a third arm was demanding a licence from a government channel which came into existence before the regime of uplinking licenses was introduced in 2005! Bizarre, but true. When the communications ministry requires a channel on one INSAT satellite to migrate to another, it wants to see their uplinking licence.

Though Gyandarshan was started after a decision of a former CEO of Prasar Bharati back in 1999, DD now claims the two Gyandarshan channels are not theirs. They carry the DD logo, they used to figure in Prasar Bharati’s annual reports, and had must carry status given by Sushma Swaraj in 2001 when she was information and broadcasting minister. How you make a channel part of your must-carry bouquet and then claim it is not a DD channel beats some people, but DD did precisely that.

If you are a DD channel, logically you should not have to pay carriage fees to DD Direct either. But the government of India does not budget for its public broadcaster the funds it needs, forcing it to make money where it can. DD asked the Gyandarshan channels to pay an annual fee of 1.5 crore per channel, which they did up to a point. But they started defaulting from September. Then they stopped paying because IGNOU held up the grant money to its own centre which runs the channel. Which is also bizarre.

Though DD claims it has allowed IGNOU carry on despite not paying the annual carriage fee to DD Direct, and that the channels going off the air has nothing to do with it, this is not strictly true. IGNOU has been asking it to migrate the channels to the new satellite as part of its bouquet from at least as far back as August, but DD upped its carriage fee demand to 4.5 crore per channel when it got the migration request. It subsequently dropped the demand for a hike after negotiations, but did not agree to migrate the channels. That problem was resolved only after they went off air.

Now the HRD ministry, which is not short of money for fanciful whims, wants to start 50 more educational channels announced by the good minister. Will somebody first put the existing channels back on air, then audit them to see whom they are reaching, then budget for further channels to go into the same vast unknown?

Sevanti Ninan is a media critic, author and editor of the media watch website thehoot.org. She examines the larger issues related to the media in a fortnightly column.

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Published: 25 Jun 2014, 11:36 PM IST
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