shri vinod sharma - Rajya Sabha

Press, in India, learned to act like a player in the major league, in the political and
socio-economic arena, despite the well-known limitations it had. They were in terms
of reach and scope, financial viability, professional training and entrepreneurial and
management capabilities. In fact, the First Press Commission noted, in 1953, that
the circulation of dailies for 1,000 people in the population was 5.4 against a
backdrop of an all-India literacy level of 16.4; a very, very thin spread of
newspapers in India. And from such a low base, we have climbed phenomenally.
But even then, this is the merit of Indian democracy. I think most leaders in the
political system, particularly parliamentarians, took the Press fairly seriously without
which we would have no tradition of the kind of parliamentary reporting that we are
all proud of. But today, the game has changed. We are more than 200 million
readers of newspapers in India. We have 130 million TV-owning households.
About 80 millions of them are served by a cable. We get a variety of offerings.
But you also have a growth of radio. You now have the Internet; maybe, there are
80 million users of the Internet. Those are the ballpark figures. A long way to
go; a lot of space for you to grow, but still a huge presence. The Media are a
huge factor in India's polity, and I applaud the hon. Chairman for his comments in
such a concise speech for focussing on these issues. One is
hypercommercialisation in the Media, and this relates to Parliament or, at least, how
you get to Parliament. These coverage packages, marketed aggressively and
systematically by newspapers, and also by private TV channels, used to criticise the
Government-owned broadcast Media.
Now you are doing much worse by selling news. Due to hyper commercialisation in
this area, many managements do not see any difference between selling ad space
to political parties during election campaigns and selling news and editorial content.
One of my colleagues told me that just before last year's Assembly elections in
Chhattisgarh, four television channels came up and several publications started up in