Switched off channels, strandedstudents

Thakur

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The HRD ministry wants to start 50 more
educational channels, but will somebody first
put the existing education channels back on
air?
Human resource development minister
Smriti Irani. Photo: Hindustan Times
Education is worth covering for the Delhi-
based national media only when it has a
clear, local, people-like-us (PLU) dimension
to it. Or when it has a minister whose picture
can be used to draw attention to any
otherwise non-saleable education-related
story.
So the travails of Delhi’s four-year
undergraduate programme (FYUP) are
covered day after day, as is Smriti Irani , the
human resource development minister. Her
pronouncements for the most part have had
a PLU angle to them. Ratings for universities,
bringing in foreign varsities, and of course,
FYUP. When she goes to rural schools as she
did in Gujarat, it is only reported locally.
Even if she has taken notice of the four
educational broadcasting channels that went
off the air earlier this month, it hasn’t been
reported. She holds forth about the 50 new
education channels her ministry is going to
launch, but we don’t know if she even knows
about the four. Two Gyandarshan channels
run by Indira Gandhi National Open
University (IGNOU), and two others run by
Indian Institutes of Technology and the
University Grants Commission were switched
off the satellite they were on by the Indian
Space Research Organisation, leaving some 3
million plus registered open university
students and lakhs of school students without
the 24-hour education telecasts and radio
programmes they have been receiving since
2000.
Only the Times of India bothered to write
about it. And nobody has even picked up
from it. Delhi’s 200,000 college aspirants and
the tiny subset of that which aspires’s to
admission in St Stephen’s College are what
count in our media universe. A fifth of all
students enrolled in higher education study
through open learning institutions; they are
the faceless millions doing correspondence
courses. They learn out of their homes and
the closest they would get to supplementary
curricular material are the Gyandarshan and
Gyanvani telecasts and broadcasts. (the latter
is a radio channel accessible over DTH to
those who get Gyandarshan1.) Gyandarshan1
was a must carry channel for every TV
platform in the country, cable or DTH, until it
disappeared from all platforms on 4 June.
These students also had access to the two
channels produced by UGC and the IITs.
These are on online platforms as well, so the
loss isn’t much when the TV channel is off
the air for students with proper Internet
access.The Gyandarshan and Gyanvani
clientele though are second-class citizens
likely to have Internet access only through
their mobiles, which is hardly great for
watching educational telecasts. The reason
why these channels suddenly disappeared is
essentially because one arm of government
did not pay the other, and a third arm was
demanding a licence from a government
channel which came into existence before the
regime of uplinking licenses was introduced
in 2005! Bizarre, but true. When the
communications ministry requires a channel
on one INSAT satellite to migrate to another,
it wants to see their uplinking licence.
Though Gyandarshan was started after a
decision of a former CEO of Prasar Bharati
back in 1999, DD now claims the two
Gyandarshan channels are not theirs. They
carry the DD logo, they used to figure in
Prasar Bharati’s annual reports, and had must
carry status given by Sushma Swaraj in 2001
when she was information and broadcasting
minister. How you make a channel part of
your must-carry bouquet and then claim it is
not a DD channel beats some people, but DD
did precisely that.
If you are a DD channel, logically you should
not have to pay carriage fees to DD Direct
either. But the government of India does not
budget for its public broadcaster the funds it
needs, forcing it to make money where it can.
DD asked the Gyandarshan channels to pay an
annual fee of Rs.1.5 crore per channel, which
they did up to a point. But they started
defaulting from September. Then they
stopped paying because IGNOU held up the
grant money to its own centre which runs the
channel. Which is also bizarre.
Though DD claims it has allowed IGNOU carry
on despite not paying the annual carriage fee
to DD Direct, and that the channels going off
the air has nothing to do with it, this is not
strictly true. IGNOU has been asking it to
migrate the channels to the new satellite as
part of its bouquet from at least as far back
as August, but DD upped its carriage fee
demand to Rs.4.5 crore per channel when it
got the migration request. It subsequently
dropped the demand for a hike after
negotiations, but did not agree to migrate the
channels. That problem was resolved only
after they went off air.
Now the HRD ministry, which is not short of
money for fanciful whims, wants to start 50
more educational channels announced by the
good minister. Will somebody first put the
existing channels back on air, then audit
them to see whom they are reaching, then
budget for further channels to go into the
same vast unknown?
 
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