November 18, 2014, 12:03 AM IST Jawhar Sircar in TOI Edit Page | Edit Page, India | TOI
Why can't India have its own BBC? This question pops up at fairly regular intervals, especially in 'cocktail circuits', where the rather provincial presentation of Doordarshan comes up. It also features in media discourses, with the obvious innuendo that Prasar Bharati – along with Akashvani and Doordarshan – is not fulfilling its mandate as an autonomous body in the same spirit as BBC. Let us get into the facts and gain some clarity.
We may begin with size and mandate. The UK has one major and five 'minority' languages, while India has 22 official languages and over 600 dialects. The audience base of the British public broadcaster and its Indian counterpart are also vastly different, where literacy and worldviews are concerned. After Independence, AIR took up the task of 'uniting' a fragmented polity, which was conscious that it was one nation but spread over 14 British provinces and 565 princely states. The large number of languages, ethnic groups and multiple competing cultures did not make its task any easier.
In a way, Akashvani brought India together in the 1950s and 60s through a renewed respect for its own classical traditions, with Nehru's information minister B V Keskar leading the campaign. This was then reinforced by spreading, intensively and extensively, the denominator that soon emerged as the nation's common idiom: Bollywood's filmi music, through Vividh Bharati.
