The meeting of the Group of Ministers (GoM) on convergence, scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed till further notice.

The dilly-dallying on the issue raises serious doubts regarding Minister for Information Technology Pramod Mahajan‘s assurance in New Delhi on Wednesday. He said the Government would try its best to introduce the bill in the Budget session. "We will introduce the Bill in the Budget session. It will then go to the standing committee. We hope to clear it either in the Monsoon session or the Winter session this year,‘‘ he said.

Mahajan said that it was yet to be decided who would pilot the bill in Parliament. The three ministries directly involved with the bill are the ministries of Information & Broadcasting, Communications and Information Technology.

Minister for Information and Broadcasting Sushma Swaraj had said in Bangalore almost a month ago (9 December) that the Government proposed to introduce the bill during the budget Session. Since then the GoM has not met.

The GoM last met on 6 December and sent the Convergence Bill draft back to jurist Fali Nariman who headed the sub-group which wrote it in the first place.

So where is the redrafted draft. Last heard the GoM was slated to meet once again on 21 December and send the redrafted draft to the Cabinet. That meeting was also deferred. The reason - members of the group were busy with Parliament proceedings.

1) Rupert Murdoch‘s India visit. The revival of Star Plus under Peter Mukerjea and its great success following Kaun Banega Crorepati and Amitabh Bachchan.
) The arrival of Kerry Packer in India and the appointment of the first Indian woman TV CEO Ravina Raj Kohli at Channel Nine. (Chandni Sehgal headed MTV India before and during its launch but was general manager of the channel and left soon thereafter .)

3) The rise and fall of Zee Telefilms.

4) The hype around Richard Li‘s NOW convergence project.

5) The IPO fever amongst wannabe stock market media darlings and the concurrent disenchantment.

6) The dot com acquisition craze by broadcasters and the subsequent collapse.

7) The failure of cricket as a programming genre because of corruption in the sport.

8) The rise of the new television companies - Balaji Telefilms, Cinevista, Nimbus, Broadcast Worldwide, Hathway, etc.

9) The revival of DD under RR Shah through the route of privatisation and commercialisation.

10) The continuing spate of announcements around broadcasting and convergence legislation and the lack of follow up thereafter.

Indian fashion will be the loser if the government follows through with Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj‘s threat that fashion channel FTV will be banned unless it "synchronises with Indian culture", B4U Managing Director Ravi Gupta said on Wednesday.

"If it (FTV) does not synchronise with our culture... I am getting it monitored for a week. After that we will show the highlights to the parliamentary consultative committee so that a joint decision can be taken," she told PTI on 31 December, 2000.

"FTV is a channel for the fashion industry. And should be seen as such. What is aired is actual ramp action both in India and across the fashion capitals of the world. It has nothing to do with pornography, Gupta stressed. He clarified that as there had been no direct communication from the government on the matter till now, whatever was being debated was purely speculative.

He also made the point that FTV provided a platform to bring Indian fashion to a global audience through its daily 10pm screenings devoted to the Indian fashion scene. "If the channel goes off the air Indian fashion stands to lose a great deal," he warned.

So how will B4U respond if there are moves to ban the channel? "We will seek legal redress," said Gupta. He however added that B4U did not plan to get into a dogfight with the government on the matter if it was adamant in its stand. "If they insist we will simply take FTV off. We won‘t make an issue of it, he said.