Mass Media and Communications
Media in independent India
Explain how television became commercial in the 1980s.
After independence, Nehru called the media the 'watchdog of democracy': they should watch over those in power and inform citizens. The government also used media for development: the Films Division made documentaries shown in cinemas before films, about dams, farming and health.
Radio: All India Radio (AIR) grew from just six stations in 1947 to 480 stations, reaching 99 per cent of the people. Vividh Bharati, an entertainment channel, began carrying advertisements from 1957.
The transistor radio of the 1960s made radio cheap and portable: farmers took it to the fields. AIR helped spread the Green Revolution with farm programmes telling farmers about new seeds and methods.
Television:
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 1959 | TV began in India, as an experiment |
| 1975–76 | SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) brought TV to about 2,400 village sets, with programmes on health, farming and education |
| 1982 | colour TV arrived with the Asian Games in Delhi |
| 1984–85 | Hum Log, India's first long-running TV soap opera |
Hum Log was sponsored by Maggi noodles, whose advertisements ran with it. This marked the start of the commercialisation of Doordarshan: TV was becoming a market as well as a public service.
There was a dark period too: during the Emergency of 1975, the press was censored, and newspapers needed government approval before printing.
So the media were first a partner of the state, and then increasingly a market.
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