A new face in a ministry is always good news for those who have been out of favour and bad for those who haven't. It is believed that much of Zee TV Chairman Subhash Chandra Goel's renewed interest in the Indian Broadcasters' Association (IBA) stems from the fact that C. M. Ibrahim is no longer the I&B Minister.

Though Chandra, who's IBA President, called a meeting in New Delhi last week ostensibly to discuss a common ratings system, the Broadcasting Bill was also on the agenda. Which was odd, because moguls like Home TV's Shobhana Bharatiya and Sun TV's Kalanidhi Maran, co-founding members of the IBA who were absent, have long been unhappy with the Bill.

They would have welcomed a meeting during Ibrahim's tenure (in fact, Bharatiya had joined a conclave of newspaper owners to protest the Bill with former PM H. D. Deve Gowda). But Chandra's silence during that period was curious.

Sources close to Ibrahim tell us that Chandra's meetings with the former I&B Minister in a certain five-star hotel in Delhi may have yielded fruit in a long-term relationship being established with Doordarshan officials. Will the equation yield any benefits for Zee TV, which would like to see curbs on foreign equity? (See the prominence CPI's point of view got on Zee News last week, the day the new I & B Ministe, S. Jaipal Reddy, made significant statements on the media, to see which way Zee hopes the wind will blow).

Little Success

Star TV's lobbying, on the other hand, seems to have been less successful. They had managed to get on the right side of Minister for Communications Beni Prasad Verma, but to no avail. His signature on the rules for the Direct-To-Home (DTH) notification had no effect and the bureaucracy appears to have stalled it till the Broadcasting Bill is passed, and a regulatory framework is put in place.

This has put paid to Star TV's all-important DTH plans. Even their plan to launch a truncated 20-channel C-band DTH package appears to have run into trouble, with Customs not clearing the import of digital decoders.

This doesn't affect networks like Discovery, which imported 4,000 analogue decoders for their encrypted service (available from March 30 onwards). But it does impact on NBC, CNBC and ESPN. All of these are available on Asiasat-2's three digital C-band transponders, which Star TV hopes to share to kick-start its own plans.

Name Game

Interestingly, the IBA meeting in Delhi was largely attended by non-members Sony Television, Discovery, BBC, Star TV and even Home TV. All technically non-Indian. The Indian biggies like Eenadu TV and Sun TV, in fact, were absent. Perhaps, Chandra will change the organisation's name, or alter the charter to include non-Indian broadcasters. But first he has to gather together all the founder-members -- Ramoji Rao of Eenadu TV, Maran from Sun TV, Lalit Modi from Modi Entertainment Network, Shobhana Bharatiya of Home TV, and Ashok Advani of BI Television.

No Relief

Those who were just getting used to Raahat, Zee TV's weekday soap at 7.30 p.m., will soon have to get used to a change, Paying Guest. Zee officials say Raman Kumar's Raahat had ample time to prove itself and meet its target of 13 TRPs. But even four months after it started, it couldn't get more than 3 TRPs in the afternoon re-run and 4 TRPs in the evening. Not enough for Zee, say officials.

Or could it be that Raahat's rather daring women were just too daring for the network that had launched Tara? After all, Raahat was originally approved by Zee's former programming chief Karuna Samtani. And remember what happened the last time Zee's sister, El, showed women with claws in TV-18's Aakansha? It went off the air, because of ``negative viewers' response''.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.