Seven Decades of Independent India

by Vinod Rai

  Flourishing newspapers need advertising, and advertisers spend their money where they think will be buyers. This made the English-language press the dominant force in news media for the first thirty years of Independence. In the late fifties, only three daily newspapers sold more than 100,000 copies a day, two in English and one in Tamil. Only sixteen newspapers sold more than 50,000 copies a day, seven of them in English.5 With production of consumer goods limited by the controlled economy, such advertising as there was went to English-language newspapers. There was little incentive to expand circulations. For proprietors who owned an Indian-language newspaper in 1947, the next thirty years were predictable and unimaginative. Between 1957 and 1977, the population grew by 240 million people to a total of 650 million. Daily newspaper circulations rose from 3.3 million to 10.6 million or from eight dailies per 1000 people to sixteen per thousand.6

  Figure 1: Indian Daily Newspaper Circulations, 1957–2010 (Total, Hindi and English)

  Source: Registrar of Newspapers for India, Press in India, for relevant years.

  Government controls and scarce advertising limited the growth of the media. The third impediment was printing technology. Most newspapers were printed on ancient flatbed presses using metal type, set by hand. The process was slow, and because imports of good newsprint were restricted and Indian language fonts were ancient and limited, the results were unattractive. Metal type required skill and investment. Since publications in Indian languages offered few rewards, most languages suffered from limited investment and had only a few basic fonts. Until the sixties, for example, Gurmukhi, the script used to print Punjabi, was available only in a single twelve-point font with nothing larger for headlines and display.

  Film was the only medium, other than newspapers, where private investment was permitted and it had two big advantages over print. First, and in spite of the government’s high-minded intentions, it was pure entertainment and did not require literate audiences. Second, producers drew profits from the sale of tickets, whereas newspapers, notwithstanding a selling price, needed advertising for profits. Popular films raked in money even if governments took a hefty share through taxes. The film industry boomed. At the time of Independence, India was producing over 200 feature films a year in ten or more languages.7 By 1980, that had risen to more than 700, and the industry was netting ticket sales worth Rs 335 crores of rupees. Films were censored for sex, violence and politics, but there were no limits to how many films a producer could make or how much could be invested.

  Television in 1977 was in its black-and-white infancy, with broadcast centres only in Delhi (1959), Mumbai (1972), Srinagar (1973), Kolkata (1975), Chennai (1975) and Lucknow (1975).8 An official in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting warned sternly that the ‘objective’ of the television was ‘not the amusement or entertainment of the urban elite, but the service and instruction of the rural masses’.9 Since there were only 1.1 million TV sets in the entire country, more than half of them in Delhi and Mumbai, the rural masses were some way from being served and instructed.

  By 1980, however, politicians began realizing the power of television. Stations were set up in Mumbai and Srinagar partly in response to the popularity of Pakistani television, viewed across the border during the 1971 war. When Indira Gandhi’s chances of re-election were clearly doomed in February 1977, officials were ordered to air the hit film Bobby on Delhi television at the same time as a giant opposition rally. A damaged print was screened. But the rally was still a great success and the Congress Party lost the election. However, when Indira Gandhi came back to power in 1980, one of her election promises was to introduce colour television across the country.

  Tightly controlled by the government, radios had spread slowly in the first thirty years of Independence, though accelerated a little by the arrival of the transistor in the mid-sixties. At Independence there were 250,000 licenced radios; 3.6 million by 1963; and 20 million by 1979.10 From 1967, a few programmes were eligible to accept limited sponsorship, but the only news was government news, and AIR’s reputation for boring programming was well established.11

  At the end of the seventies, Indian Post and Telegraphs (IP&T) provided the most accessible means of communication for most Indians. IP&T carried 8 billion items a year (up from 2.3 billion in the fifties) and ran more than 120,000 post offices, with more than 100,000 of them in rural areas. IP&T was also the monopoly provider of two million telephones and managed the antiquated copper-wire telephone network for 680 million people.12

  ‘Modern’ World, 1979–2005

  Three developments in the seventies brought dramatic changes in India’s media. First, a relentless growth in population and expansion of the numbers of literates created huge potential markets for whatever consumer goods were available. The literate population increased from 60 million in 1951 to 240 million by 1981. More than 95 per cent of the literates spoke only Indian languages. Advertisers in the years after Independence chose to equate English language newspaper circulations as a proxy for the number of people with sufficient purchasing power to buy most consumer goods. Major advertising, therefore, flowed to English language publications. In 1970, an alliance of advertising firms and business advertisers commissioned the first National Readership Survey (NRS-I). It showed that about a quarter of urban Indians read print media regularly and pointed to a huge potential for Indian language publications to reach new categories of buyers.13 A few proprietors began looking for ways to expand their circulations and increase advertising rates. The Kanpur-based Hindi daily Dainik Jagran opened a second publishing centre in Gorakhpur in eastern UP in 1974. The new Telugu daily Eenadu started a Hyderabad edition in 1975. In Kerala, where newspapers were more widely published and purchased than anywhere else, the two Malayalam dailies, Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi, had set up additional publication centres in 1962 and 1968. There were signs—and a few success stories—to indicate that there was purchasing power among readers of Indian languages outside the major cities.

  The second incentive for the spread of newspapers came from the Emergency itself. Because of censorship and fear, people were immensely curious to know what had really happened in those months. What was Indira Gandhi’s government suppressing? When the Emergency ended, media boomed. Circulation of Hindi dailies almost doubled in four years (from 1.9 million a day in 1976 to 3.6 million in 1980) and squeaked ahead of English for the first time in 1979.

  Technology provided the third element in the growth equation. Indian manufacturers started to make offset presses under licence from foreign companies from the mid-seventies, and photocomposition of Indian scripts arrived in the eighties.14 Together, they liberated Indian languages and their scripts from the prison of metal type where Gutenberg technology had confined them. Metal moulds for every letter were no longer necessary. An infinite array of characters could live in a computer’s memory, called up when needed and printed on an offset press that transferred ink to paper by a chemical process, not a mechanical one. Offset also enabled fast, effective colour printing. Indian language dailies could for the first time have big picture-laden colour layouts with a variety of typefaces.

  Table 1: Daily Circulations; All Languages, Hindi and English, 1958–2010 (in millions)

  Source: Press in India for relevant years.

  When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, there had already been an easing of some regulations on economic activity and import of equipment. And, as the Bobby incident during the 1977 election campaign illustrated, she and her advisers had had a change of heart about the utility of television. TV had been regarded as a toy for the well-off or a possible tool for educating peasants. The country had 160,000 television sets when the Emergency began.15 Colour TV was introduced to telecast the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982. Doordarshan, the government television monopoly, had started accepting commercials in 1976. In the eighties, it became ‘hooked to its new cash cow’, from which it extracted more than Rs 500 crore in revenue by the end of the decade.16 />
  Technology, control and consumption met in an awkward mating ritual in 1991. The first Gulf War in 1991 gutted India’s foreign exchange reserves and forced a Congress-led government to abandon more of the old ‘socialist’ economic controls. Television, delivered by satellite, was a feature of the Gulf War, and CNN beamed into homes around the world. In India, enterprising technicians put dishes on roofs, captured satellite signals and ran copper wire to surrounding households—for a fee. It worked, and people loved it, but it was against the law for anyone other than Doordarshan to telecast to India, and only it had the right to use the communication satellites that India had put in space from 1981. But Indian authorities could not prevent video recordings, made in India, from being flown to Hong Kong or Russia where studios staffed by Indians would send them via non-Indian satellites back to viewers in India hooked up to enterprising (and illegal) cable distributors capturing signals on illegal dishes and funnelling them to subscribers’ homes.17 These telecasts carried advertisements for Indian products that were paid for in various inventive ways. Indian satellite TV developed an immediate following because it was not government-controlled, and it offered livelier programming than Doordarshan could aspire to. For an economy that was now encouraged to cater to consumers, and a middle class that was encouraged to consume, lively television was the place to advertise. Successive governments searched for ways to control these offshore broadcasters, but by the year 2000, they had recognized independent Indian television channels.

  The tortuous arrival of competitive television did not harm newspapers.18 Indeed, some proprietors thought television encouraged literacy and newspaper readership by making people curious to read about what they had seen. Between 1995 and 2005, daily newspaper circulations rose from 35 million a day to 87 million.19 Households with television sets increased from 35 million in the early nineties to 100 million by 2004.20 More importantly, the expenditure on advertising increased from about Rs 9 billion in the early nineties to Rs 110 billion by 2003. Print publications still harvested nearly half.21 This was a dynamic and profitable world in which to be a media proprietor, but from about 2004, digital media in the popular form of the mobile phone began to blow it apart.

  Digital World, 2005–?

  In July 2013, IP&T (Indian Posts and Telegraph) shed the T in the acronym when it closed the telegram service. Western Union, the famed US company, had ended telegrams seven years earlier. The reason was obvious: now ‘everyone has a mobile phone’. Cheap digital technology brought a new and unpredictable media world.

  The first allocation of radio frequency spectrum (RF) to private companies to provide mobile phone services was carried out in 1995. It was a fiasco that ended years later with corrupt politicians going to jail. The bungled allocation process, and the stringent charges and conditions imposed on successful companies, meant that the inept, government-owned landline telephone system had no serious challenge until 2004.22

  If 1979 was a landmark year for print when Hindi daily circulations surpassed English, 2005 was the landmark for the new world of digital electronic media. Mobile phone connections exceeded landlines for the first time (52 million to 41 million). The change was breathtakingly fast and widespread. By the end of 2015, there were 997 million telephone connections, 97 per cent of them mobiles. Landline connections fell to 24 million.23

  During these ten years, up to ten companies were competing for customers pushing 2G and 3G phones into every corner of urban India and much of the countryside. It was a classic ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ story—vast numbers of clients, each generating a tiny revenue. By the end of 2016, however, average revenue per user (ARPU) had fallen to about Rs 100 a month.24

  2G phones were immensely attractive in a country with large newly literate or illiterate people and a multiplicity of scripts. Consumers valued the ability to communicate without having to write, and especially liked the fact that a ‘feature phone’ could perform as a torch, camera, photo album, and audio and video player—and that it could be used privately and spontaneously. In some regions, mobile phones allowed local performers to create far wider audiences for their music in ways that the cassette recorder had done more modestly thirty years earlier.

  When Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance acquired major interests in a group of TV channels and print and entertainment enterprises in 2012, a rival media organization concluded that ‘Ambani is the new media mogul’.25 The company acquired appropriate spectrum in all regions in 2010 and began laying more than 200,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable across the country for launching mass-market 4G telecom that would allow users to watch events in real time on their handheld devices. The business plan was to own the toll way—a fast fibre optic network that would transmit vast amounts of data at lightning speed and charge a monthly fee to use ‘the road’ or ‘the pipe’. Anyone sending deliveries (data) along it, and receiving such deliveries (as games, movies, calls, music, weather reports, etc.), would pay usage fee for the traffic initiated.

  While the companies with rights to radio frequency for 2G and 3G phones expanded telecom industries and subscribers after 2004, Mukesh Ambani was laying the groundwork for a hugely ambitious scheme, which, if successful, would enable consumers to connect with real time, or ‘live’ video and interactive materials from throughout the world. The Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) already owns conventional television channels and has interests in an old-fashioned newspaper chain. If the telecom gamble with Reliance Jio succeeds, RIL will have a superior influence over what is transmitted on their network of fibre optic cable.

  By April 2017, Reliance Jio had more than 70 million customers and had provoked the predicted ‘consolidation’ of telecommunication companies. Vodafone (British owned) said it would merge with Idea (A.K. Birla), and a similar merger was in the works between Aircel and Reliance Communications. It is likely that India will go from more than a dozen telecom providers to three major private providers, with government providers BSNL and MTNL struggling to stay afloat.

  The attractions of a complete 4G service would be overwhelming if the speed of data transfer could be maintained and the cost of handsets kept low. In April 2017, a new 4G phone could be bought for less than Rs 5000 making it affordable for the poor. Would they be able to afford the cost of data, which is from where revenues would come for telecom providers?

  Two words dominate such discussions: consolidation and convergence. In both print and telecommunications, the small tend to get smaller and are eventually taken over or disappear. The Times of India group (officially, Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd—BCCL) had become a veritable giant in the newspaper industry during the nineties. By 2017, it ran the largest English language TV news channel, had half a dozen specialist channels; the largest newspaper chain—Times of India—and owned daily newspapers in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Bengali, along with FM radio stations. Its great rival of former times, the Statesman of Kolkata, had all but disappeared, and the Hindustan Times of Delhi, The Hindu of Chennai and the Indian Express (of many places) were left far behind.

  But print in India continues to make profits and retain subscribers, in contrast to much of the rest of the world.26 Most big print companies ventured into other media to try to anticipate where consumers would put funds and their advertising in future. India has no regulations prohibiting ‘cross-media ownership’—the control of various media by a single company.

  The stunted radio industry benefited from removal of economic controls and digitization. But all national governments struggled to retain control of the radio. Private radio stations were licenced only in 2000, and even in 2017 the only news that the more than 240 stations were permitted to broadcast was feeds from the All India Radio.27 Television, of course, had been doing news from the early nineties, even if the early efforts had to be beamed in from foreign-owned satellites. But television in 2017 was fully commercialized with more than 800 channels arriving in 185 million households via satellite, cable and land-based broadcast.

/>   The film industry had adapted to different conditions for making revenue. With more than 10,000 screens, most with digital projection and housed in multiscreen locations, the practice of seeing films in cinema halls had not died with television and the Internet. And as converging technologies brought daily audiovisual experience into the lives of more people, India’s large pool of film-making and computer-literate talent found possibilities for earning a living and creating new forms of media.

  Summing up Three Worlds

  The growing ability of people to use media in the first seventy years of Independence was revolutionary. When Nehru made his ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech in August 1947, fewer than 60 million people could read and write. In 2017, there are more than 800 million literates. Most of the literate people in 1947 would have rarely seen a telephone, heard a radio, read a newspaper or gone to a movie. The stamps, postcards and rare telegrams of IP&T provided the only ways to communicate, besides occasional face-to-face meetings at marriages and religious festivals. In Narendra Modi’s India of 2017, mobile phone connectivity was 88 per cent; more than 150 million newspapers were produced every day; and two-thirds of households had a television set, the vast majority hooked up to cables or satellites giving access to hundreds of television channels.

  Indians want what consumers of media everywhere seem to want: to see themselves reflected, to communicate with friends and relations, to be entertained and informed, and to be enabled to use services, to buy and to sell. Along with the potential to connect with the rest of the world, the other great change since 1947 lay in the control of the media. In 1947, government controlled the miniscule system of radio and telephones; newspapers were rare, their presses vulnerable and censorship when invoked was relatively simple. Movies had offered possibilities to test the authority of foreign rulers, but producers had to couch nationalist themes in classical metaphors to slide messages past the censor. In 2017, some of the controls remain, but often they have become meaningless. The Central Board of Film Certification may ban a film, but it will become available via the Internet or informal transfers from one device to another.