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Wanted: CEOs from India

JV Vilanilam:

Not only TV sets, but many of the modern gadgets and luxury items considered common necessities in rich developed countries from the early part of the last century were not available in India either during the British period of its history or the early years of Independence. Even good roads or buses were not available in India except in metropolitan cities.

Things have changed from 1990 onwards, with the advent of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. Whereas the country had only 58 licensed TV sets in 1964, the year of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, India is the third largest TV market in the world today. And of an estimated total of 112 million (11.2 crores) of TV households among a total population of over 1000 million (100 crores), 60% have satellite connection, according to NRS Key Findings. The number of brands advertised on news channels quadrupled from 913 to 4,779 during 2000-2005. In short, Indian TV presents a magic picture of expansion, luxury and affluence.

Nalin Mehta has made an authoritative, well-documented and scholarly study of this great TV expansion as part of his PhD dissertation at the La Trobe University in Australia under the guidance of a famous authority on the Indian media scene, professor Robin Jeffrey. He has communicated his findings effectively in about 300 pages of text and nearly 100 pages of documentation. The book traces the history of outstanding TV channels in India — Zee, NDTV, Aaj Tak, STAR and Asianet with little known facts about the financial and technical aspects of their growth, based on interviews with key figures and personal knowledge gained by the author’s work in some of these media organisations.

The saga of the mega growth of TV in India and the growth of New Delhi and Mumbai into big media centres comparable to Hong Kong and Singapore is also told in a delightful manner without losing sight of the medium’s sociological, political, economic and cultural impacts on the life of Indians, urban as well as rural. Between 1992 and 2006, over 50 24-hour news networks have operated in 11 of the 15 major Indian languages and the number of channels and languages is likely to increase in the coming years.