Prasar Bharati: Where is the money for programming?

Courtesy:  www.livemint.com

Today, Doordarshan is a broadcaster without resources; it can't be made relevant without fixing that Sevanti Ninan

FIRST PUBLISHED: FRI, AUG 15 2014. 12 00 AM IST

How relevant is Prasar Bharati the broadcaster? That question is best answered by looking at where its money goes. Technology and manpower eat up all the money the government allocates for Prasar Bharati. There isn't any left for programming. The Pitroda committee report puts out a simple statistic. In 2011-12, the operational cost of distributing Doordarshan's signal was Rs.723 crore. Of this, 88% was spent on terrestrial distribution, which reached 8% of the audience. 

Only 7% of the cost went towards reaching the 53% of the audience in cable and satellite households. And only 6% went towards reaching the 37% in direct-to-home, or DTH, households. Here's how the situation looks on the ground. There is a somewhat forlorn looking relay centre at Bhimavaram in Krishna district, which exemplifies DD's terrestrial redundancy. It is a throwback to the days where all transmission was terrestrial and you had to switch manually between local, regional and national transmission. Today, this function has disappeared.

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