Audiences got taste of reality TV through 26/11 strikes

Jan 26, 2010

NEW DELHI, WHEN CHINESE broadcaster Li Kashing launched Star TV in India in 1992, little did he realise that he was going to usher in a veritable satellite TV revolution. From one satellite channel in 1992, there are 417 satellite channels across India today. Of these, 73 are news channels offering 24x7 news. One hundred more news channels will begin telecasting in 2010.

India is in the throes of a media revolution. Radio in India has also witnessed a major boom, with a huge increase in the number of FM stations broadcasting today. Surprisingly, unlike Europe and the US, where newspaper readership has plunged, in India the opposite has happened and the trend is a rising curve. In 1976, when India’s population was 775 million, the data showed that there was one newspaper copy for every 80 Indians; today the population has crossed one billion and there is one newspaper copy for every 20 Indians. Rising literacy figures, especially in the Hindi heartland, have seen a huge circulation rise in the Hindi and regional press. Official figures suggest there are over 62,000 newspapers in circulation today.

This has been matched by the rise of Internet. Youngsters are not just getting their news or searching for jobs on the Net. Ten million Indians are logging on to networking sites like Facebook and Orkut. Combine this with the social revolution caused by the use of cellphone and we realise the sizeable numbers who have internalised the idiom of all these different technological modes of communication. Not to be outdone is the success of YouTube where a youngster has only to hire a camera, burn a DVD and put it on YouTube.

Needless to say, the unleashing of so many technologies has fuelled an information revolution. How else can one explain why an entire nation was glued to the telly to watch a four-year-old called "Prince" being saved after he fell into a 58-feet-deep borewell outside the nondescript village of Haldaheri located 200 km north of Delhi. The Prince rescue operation was in a sense a precursor to the playing out of the Jessica Lal and the Priyadarshini Mattoo case on television. Subsequent follow-ups have been the Aman Kachroo ragging case and the Nitish Katara murder case.

Reality TV has arrived in India and audiences got their first big taste of it with the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The image of the smoking cupolas of the Taj hotel transfixed the nation in its agony. India’s information landscape has also been dramatically altered by the Congress-led coalition’s decision to implement the Right to Information Act which equips individual citizens to raise queries against the government. Several lakh RTIs have been lodged since the Act came into being. Shastri Bhavan officials bemoan how several thousand of them are now tied down to providing "information" to satisfy RTI activists.

Rashme Sehgal

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