Column: The idiot box can emancipate

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: A few months ago, health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad had remarked that providing TV sets to households can have a positive effect on population control. Turns out that Azad hit the bull’s eye. Economic research shows that turning on the TV can be a simple yet influential way of improving a woman’s standing in rural India.

Beyond providing entertainment, television vastly increases both the availability of information about the outside world and exposure to other ways of life. Anthropological accounts suggest that the growth of TV in rural areas has had significant effects on a wide range of day-to-day lifestyle behaviours, including latrine building and fan usage. Unlike anthropological studies, where causal effects of TV ownership are hard to document, recent research in economics provides evidence of the causal effect of the introduction of cable TV in rural areas of India on attitudes towards and discrimination against women. Emily Oster of the University of Chicago and Robert Jensen of the University of California, Los Angeles, find in their study The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women’s Status in India that the introduction of cable TV in India had a significant positive effect on various measures of women’s status in India.

In a 1992 article, Amartya Sen argued that India had 41 million ‘missing women’—women and girls who died prematurely due to mistreatment resulting from a dramatically male-biased population. The population bias towards men has only gotten worse in the last two decades as sex-selective abortion has been more widely used to avoid female births. More broadly, girls are discriminated against in nutrition, medical care, vaccination and education. Also, gender inequality is significantly worse in rural than in urban areas.

The advent of cable TV in the 1990s seems to have had a positive effect on mitigating these social ills. While television was first introduced to India in 1959, for the first three decades, all broadcasting was regulated by the government. The most significant innovation in terms of both content and viewership was the introduction of satellite TV in the early 1990s. In the five years from 2001 to 2006, about 30 million households, representing approximately 150 million individuals, added cable service. Jensen and Oster examine the effect of this change.