BackBengal govt to take over Saradha group’s media enterprise
Mamata Banerjee plans to rescue the group’s Broadcast Worldwide’s two television channels, save about 170 jobs
Premium(Subhendu Ghosh/Hindustan Times)
Kolkata: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday announced that her government would take over Broadcast Worldwide Ltd—a media enterprise of the collapsed Saradha Group—to rescue its two television channels and save about 170 jobs.
A law will be promulgated to take control of the firm under the provisions of the Act on nationalization of private firms. The proposed law will need the assent of the President to be implemented, Banerjee said.
The move isn’t unique in itself—the West Bengal government has in the past made attempts to take control of dying media organizations, but has had little success in the long run.
A defunct Bengali newspaper taken over by the state now functions as a printing press. The erstwhile Left Front government tried to sell it, but didn’t find any takers.
Surjya Kanta Mishra of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and leader of the Opposition in the legislative assembly criticized Banerjee’s move saying taxpayers will have to pick up the tab for her largesse.
She has already announced a ₹ 500-crore relief fund for the poorest Saradha Group depositors who have lost their money.
The takeover of Broadcast Worldwide also means that the state cannot liquidate the firm’s assets to repay depositors duped by the Saradha Group.
Weeping anchors on one of Broadcast Worldwide’s channels had in mid-April drawn Banerjee’s attention to the public deposit-taking Saradha Group, which by then had already started winding up its businesses.
Officials at the state’s information and cultural affairs department said Banerjee was moved by the sight of Tara Music’s anchors sobbing on live television on the first day of the Bengali calendar year.
Banerjee has said that she didn’t know anything about the Saradha Group and its businesses until she heard the anchors say the channel was facing closure.
She then asked party leaders to find out what had gone wrong and to make arrangements to keep it and another channel—Tara News—afloat.
Since the Saradha Group ran aground, employees have been running these channels with donations from the Trinamool Congress leaders and artistes featured on Tara Music.
They had even moved the Calcutta high court, seeking its approval for this arrangement. The court appointed a three-member committee headed by a former judge to oversee the company’s operations as an interim measure.
It isn’t immediately known how much the takeover of the two channels would cost the state exchequer, but according to government officials, Broadcast Worldwide has a confirmed liability of at least ₹ 6 crore.
That apart, Banerjee is immediately releasing ₹ 26 lakh from her relief fund to pay the employees of the firm a one-time solatium of ₹ 16,000 each because they have not received salaries for at least four months.
Welcoming the state’s move, Anindita Kazi, chief adviser for programming at Broadcast Worldwide, said many people had expressed their willingness to bail out the imperilled channels, but government control of the firm meant unparalleled security for employees.
Apart from these two channels, two Saradha Group newspapers, one in Bengali and the other in Urdu, targeted at the state’s Muslim population, are being run with the financial support of a Trinamool Congress leader.
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