Arunachal goes live with North East Live [September 29, 2013]

Arunachal goes live with North East Live

With the launch of North East Live, a 24x7 News Channel on this day, the 30th of September 2013, Arunachal Pradesh media industry has come of age.  The promoters, especially Chief Managing Director Ms Takam Moni, deserve full credit for venturing into a new space-satellite channel, which none dared before. In a state, already sprinkled with several newspapers- daily and weekly, few magazines and a radio station, it is refreshing to have an electronic channel which we can call our own – “Arunachal’s Channel”. Indian Television Industry has been in existence for nearly four decades and here, finally, we arrive- joining the mainstream media players!

There’s emotional connect with the new channel. To begin with, one gets the sense that the new channel -“North East Live”- would be leveraging on an innate desire and a yearning for “own channel” airing and focusing on news and views from a local perspective. Wanting a channel, amongst the Arunachalees, touches emotional crescendo especially during untoward incidents involving Arunachal-Assam boundary disputes along the foothill areas. It evokes  a lot of anguish when minimum of 4-5 Assam based electronic channels beam images and rants biased news reports and feed the same news/visuals to national channels. Thus, one reads the launch of channel as a fulfillment of long cherished dream for Arunachalees. On a practical level, with low literacy rendering most Arunachalees unable to read newspapers, the presence of an electronic channel besides the All India Radio will reduce the constraint to a large extent. Further, it will break the distribution bottleneck that print-media faces currently.

Looking back at the history and growth of television in the country, one recalls elders talking about AIR broadcasting and Doordarshan (DD) beaming colour images of 1982 Delhi Asian Games but for next decade the state owned broadcaster DD tightened its monopoly. All said and done, it needs to be conceded that after Sardar Vallabhai Patel, DD managed to complete the process of nation building--uniting almost all corners of the country, through many path-breaking programmes.

However, the nation was divided into segments after foreign programmers including CNN, Star TV etc made inroads and few domestic channels such as Sun TV and Zee TV became household names commercially. In little more than two decades, India is the third largest television market in the world and as on today almost 400 channels (paid and free) are on air. But despite the distinction penetration is still as low as 60%. Alternatively, 40% of 120 billion people are yet to own TV, hence TV industry is on edge of an exponential growth in near future. Commercially, combining advertising and subscription revenues of TV channel stood at Rs. 38,000 crore during fiscal 2011-12.

Unquestionably, television channels’ survival is dependent on commercial opportunity which  for the NE electronic channels is a major handicap since the region has just about 4% of India’s population and advertisers are not very keen to put money in NE based channels since this business is completely target rating point (TRP) driven. Thus, at policy level, the government of India must step-in to ensure viability of electronic channels in the region, as part of nation-building and national integration efforts.  The electronic channel and print media of the region must be accorded with special status. Department of Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP) under Minister of Information and Broadcasting must revisit the advertisement share and rate for the entire NE region. The NE region, especially Arunachal Pradesh is a different ball-game altogether with infrastructural challenges, multi-ethnicity issues, geo-strategic importance and challenges with trained human resources for electronic channels. Therefore, market forces like demand-supply or for that matter TRP should not be a parameter for GoI’s I&B Ministry to increase the advertisement share and rate.

As the saying goes, if you don’t exist in the media you don’t exist at all- a fact well known by the people of this hilly state; the newly launched channel to this effect may play an instrumental role in giving voice to the problem of this unique and strategically located region and ensure a true understanding of the ground realities and become an eye-opener to the people at the centre and mainstream India, for whom the land has always been shrouded in mystery due to lack of exposure.