On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor at Varanasi. He even offered puja at the temple complex. The entire ceremony was telecast live on all the news channels, streaming of which was courtesy the public broadcaster Doordarshan. Subsequently, many questioned the live telecast of a seemingly religious programme done by the Prime Minister by public broadcaster. Many ‘liberals’ were even upset at the corridor being made on ‘tax payers’ money’ by a government of a ‘secular nation’.
The Kashi redevelopment was part of the governance and one of the many promises made by the ruling party in the manifesto (because of which they were elected to power). Similarly, to claim that the live telecast of the ‘Hindu’ programme by public broadcaster like Doordarshan was on tax-payers’ money is actually quite incorrect.
So easily have we normalised the Indian state’s shift towards majoritarianism that its easy to forget this is a (multi-cam) govt. event, attended by functionaries who have taken an oath under a secular Constitution. https://t.co/vfiIWvGkY8
— Sreenivasan Jain (@SreenivasanJain) December 13, 2021
NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain was particularly upset that this was a ‘multi-cam govt event’. He even quoted Prasar Bharati, the umbrella organisation of Doordarshan television network, for expressing his displeasure. The tweet was further retweeted by the other ‘secular liberals’ like Rana Ayyub.
However, Doordarshan is not run only on public funding as is the misconception.
How Doordarshan earns money to spend
As per Shashi Shekhar Vempati, CEO of Prasar Bharati, Doordarshan has to earn its money to run the operations.
That is yet another popular misconception. DD has to earn its money to run its operations. Public money does not fund broadcast operational expenditure of DD. Public funding is only to the extent of salaries of government employees on deputation to DD.
— Shashi Shekhar Vempati शशि शेखर (@shashidigital) August 29, 2020
In August 2020, while responding to a Twitter user, Vempati had said that the public money, or tax payers’ money is used only to the extent of salaries of government employees who are on deputation to the Doordarshan. For rest, DD has to earn its own money.
In April 2019, while speaking at Kautilya Fellows Programme, Vempati talked about the public broadcasters in other countries and in India and how they are all different. He had said that for British public broadcasting service like the BBC or Japan’s NHK, funding is not dependent on the government. They work on licence fees which are collected from the citizens who own television sets and have access to the channels. In America, it works on the federal grant as well as funds raised locally.
However, in India, there is a different model. Vempati explained that when Prasar Bharati was created in 1997, all assets of All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan were transferred to the corporation. In India, the corporates fall under The Companies Act, 1956. However, Prasar Bharati does not fall under The Companies Act either. It is a statutory autonomous body.
He further explained that once Prasar Bharati was created, the employees of AIR and DD continued to stay employees of government of India. Hence, it was a uniquely hybrid model where corporate was autonomous but those working under the umbrella were government employees. While salaries, pension and other such expenses of employees came from central government, rest of the operations need to be funded on the own as a corporate would.
“So in that sense we are very unique if I take away these wages and related expenses, all of my operational expenditure has to be funded by my revenue generation from commercial advertising and sponsorship and whatever other commercial activities I can undertake, which is a huge challenge because nowhere in the world does a public broadcaster sustains itself through advertising. In India we ended up doing it because of the unique model we have where operations have to be funded from our revenues,” he had said.
