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indiantelevision.com Team
NEW DELHI: Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Minister Manish Tewari on Tuesday suggested government should have a role in ?enabling regulatory architecture ? for media, noting that regulation was not keeping pace with march of technology.
Tewari said the media resented regulation of any sort but felt it was necessary to introspect whether the government should be given some latitude for regulating the broadcast media.
It was necessary that a regulatory and enabling environment is in place at a time when the media was on the cusp of a change, he said and described self-regulation as an oxymoron.
The news broadcasters have a self-regulatory mechanism under News Broadcasters Association (NBA) and non-news broadcasters under Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF).
Tewari noted that the broadcasting sector has grown from just one public service channel 20 years ago to over 850 private channels now, and the FM radio had also seen exponential growth.
While dwelling on the social media, Tewari said regulation had failed to keep pace with technology and stressed the need for an enabling regulatory architecture that helps in adapting to changes in newer media.
He wondered how the democratisation of the information paradigm will affect the social milieu. ?While the right to privacy is an intrinsic part of the Constitution, the right to anonymity could be corrosive to social order.?
He was also concerned over issues relating to television rating points which were skewed in favour of the private channels at present. Noting that digitisation may help resolve this issue, he said there was a need for greater deliberation on this issue.
Tewari was delivering the inaugural address at the three-day Broadcast Engineering Services Expo organised by the Broadcast Engineering Society (India). The theme of the conference is ?Convergence and New Broadcast Technologies?.
Earlier, I&B Secretary Uday Kumar Varma said the TRP issue would not ordinarily be something that the government should be worried about, but felt skewed TRPs should not lead to deterioration of content. Furthermore, Prasar Bharati was not getting its fair share in the TRP system at present.
Referring to digitisation, Varma said it was unfortunate that ?we are still struggling with the standards of set top boxes? and regretted that the STBs had no portability.
He expressed satisfaction that the first phase had been very successful, particularly since even developed countries had taken up to a decade to digitise and India had achieved this in less than a year.
He said the plurality and the number of channels had grown so vastly that India was now second only to China, having overtaken the United States.
The I&B Secretary said digitisation gives new opportunities, but how one uses this opportunity is up to the stakeholder.
Referring to radio, Varma wondered why medium wave (MW) could not be developed and helped the way FM Radio was being helped. He said MW had its own specific purpose.
He said the government was keen that India should develop as a digital hub and the relaxations in the foreign direct investment scheme and infrastructure were aimed to make India a preferred destination.
Sam Pitroda, advisor to the Prime Minister on public information infrastructure and innovation, said every fourth Indian will be connected via broadband within the next few years.
