Having met the minister, Mr Thiellet held parleys with several Indian broadcasters to figure out how FTV could be Indianised. Sources say that FTV may get into a strategic alliance with an Indian broadcaster for an India-specific fashion channel. However, talks are at an initial stage right now. Although the FTV Director, Mr Michael Adam, was scheduled to visit India to discuss the matter with the I&B Minister, Mr Thiellet came down instead. Mr Thiellet's trip follows a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee attached to the I&B Ministry last week which registered near-unanimous ``disapproval'' of the contents of the channel.

The 23-member committee, which was headed by Ms Swaraj and included members such as Ms Shabana Azmi, Mr NKP Salve, and Mr Pritish Nandy, watched the monitored clips of FTV telecast and felt that parts of the telecast were obscene and not suitable for Indian viewing. However, members of this committee did not demand a ban on the channel as it is undemocratic to ban achannel, they said. Instead, they had sought some changes in the contents of the channel. Ms Swaraj had assured the members of the committee at the time that she would take up the matter with the channel authorities and find a way out. The government, it was said, would persuade FTV to remove the objectionable segments from the telecast beamed to India. So alarming has been the concern over FTV that the Central Monitoring Service under the I&B Ministry has been monitoring the channel for a few months now. Not only that, access to the Website of FTV-www.ftv.com-was blocked in all the government departments last week. According to an official in the French Information Centre, FTV promotes fashion and design and therefore useful to the Indian fashion industry. Programming of the channel can be suitably changed, he says, through dialogues with the Indian government and broadcasters.