Article

India and Its Television: Ownership, Emerging Economy Studies

1(1) 5063
Democracy, and the Media Business 2015 International
Management Institute
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2394901514562304
http://emi.sagepub.com
Nalin Mehta1

Abstract
With annual revenues of about $17 billion in 2012, India is among the worlds top 15 global media and

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entertainment markets. While much attention has been focused in recent years on Indias rise as an
emerging economy, its great-power potential as the worlds largest democracy and the future trajectory
of its growth but the role of Indias burgeoning media industry in this wider story is much less understood.

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For a country with the worlds largest newspaper market, second largest telecommunications market,

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third largest television market and second largest Facebook community, the virtual absence of India from

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most mainstream global communications studies within academia is strange. In revenue terms, Indias share
of the global media sector still remains small but within the top 15 media and entertainment economies,
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only India has had consistent over-15 percent growth rates for years. Yet, outside of India, within the wider
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ambit of policy and international relations, few understand the crucial role Indian media play in the ebbs
and flows of Indian politics and how central it is to Indias boisterous democracy. This article concentrates
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on Indian television and its future directions. Combined with the rise of the other device that has grown
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faster than toilets in Indiathe mobile phonetelevision has fundamentally reshaped Indian democracy
and emerged as a critical social lever. This article outlines ownership patterns in Indian television, the
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divergences and commonalities across regional languages and what this means for Indias democracy.
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Keywords
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India, Indian television, Indian media, ownership patterns, regional languages and media in India, Indian
politics and democracy, digital media
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In October 2012, owners, chief executive officers
(CEOs), and leaders of some of Indias biggest
media groups met in a five-star hotel in Delhi to
confabulate for two days on how to shift gears in
their business, take advantage of the tectonic shifts
in the global economy, and turn India into a major
global player in this sector. With annual revenues of
$17 billion, India was among the top 15 global media
and entertainment markets at the time, but the aim of
this elite group was to figure out a roadmap for taking
it to the top three in the list, with up to $100 billion
in revenues.2 With Indias media grandees rubbing
shoulders with global media CEOs, management
gurus, and the leading lights of cultural studies
like Arjun Appadurai, this was a rare closed-door
business meeting designed for introspection, rather
than self-promotion. It was also a rare occasion to
think outward for expansion, rather than inward
at the million internal struggles which normally
2
CII India-The Big Picture Summit, October 2930,
2014.

1
Associate Professor, Shiv Nadar University, National Capital Region, Delhi
Corresponding author:
Nalin Mehta, 1743, ATS Village, Sector 93A, Noida, 201301 Uttar Pradesh, India.
E-mail: nalinnikki@gmail.com
Mehta 51
Figure 1. Small but Rising: India in the Global Media and Entertainment Economy
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Source: Jha (2012).
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besiege the Indian media sector. This was important
not just for those who are interested in media per se
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or rise and fall of individual companies but because
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of the larger role media industries play at the center
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of large economies, as shapers of identity and as
levers of social power and democracy.
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Much attention has been focused in recent years
FO
on the rise of India as a global economy, its great
power potential as the worlds largest democracy,
T
and the future trajectory of its growth. The role of
O
Indias burgeoning media industry in this wider
story is much less understood. For a country with
N
the worlds largest newspaper market, second-
largest telecommunications market, third-largest
television market, and second-largest Facebook
community, the virtual absence of India from most
mainstream global communication studies within
academia is strange (Mehta, in press).
In revenue terms, of course, Indias share of the
global media sector still remains small (Figure 1).
Within the top 15 media and entertainment econo-
mies, however, only India has had consistent over
15 percent growth rates for years. Within this
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domain, it is part of a phalanx of BRICS economies
whose combined 13.2 percent growth rate between
2012 and 2016 dwarfs the 45 percent pace in
mature economies.3 This is why there is such a
global interest in Indian media at the moment with
companies like Disney and Viacom flocking to
Indian shores (Figure 1).
In subsectors like the newspaper industry, the
contrast is even more strident. India, along with
China, is the country in the world where newspa-
per subscriptions continue to grow. At a time when
newspapers around the world are dying (Figure 2),
over a 100 million newspaper copies hit Indian
3
Consulting firm PwC estimates M&E sector growth
rates between 2012 and 2016 as follows: India, 17 per-
cent; China, 13.5 percent; Brazil, 11.3 percent; Russia,
11.6 percent; Japan, 3.1 percent; France, 4.1 percent;
UK, 3.8 percent; Germany, 2.8 percent; and US, 5.8
percent. Overall it estimates growth rates in this sec-
tor in mature economies as 45 percent, while BRICS
growth rates are over 13.2 percent. These estimates
were made in 2012 and while there may be slight vari-
ations the broad picture remains accurate (Jha, 2012).
52 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)
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Figure 2. Estimated Change in Newspaper Revenues: Year on Year (20072009)
Source: Nielsen and Levy (2010).
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streets every morning. Regional markets like
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Oriya, the language of the backward eastern state
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of Odisha, generate 3.5 million newspapers a day,
and Marathi and Telugu generate more than 6 mil-
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lion newspapers each. Such numbers exceed the
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newspaper subscriptions in countries such as
Canada and Australia.4
Numbers like these illustrate the size and scope
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of Indias media. Yet, outside India, within the
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wider ambit of policy and international relations,
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few understand the crucial role Indian media play
in the ebbs and flows of Indian politics, and how
central it is to public debate in Indias boisterous
democracy.
4
Data from Robin Jeffrey, Visiting Research
Professor, National University of Singapore. Prof.
Jeffrey has since the 1990s maintained the most
accurate and up-to-date chart of national and
regional newspaper circulations in India combining
data from various sources.
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This article concentrates on Indian television
and its future directions. In September 2009, Indias
then prime minister, army chief, and national
security advisor launched a coordinated attempt to
douse television speculation about alleged Chinese
military incursions on the disputed eastern border.
All three leaders issued denials after days of intense
focus by Indias private TV news networks which
had accused the government of hushing up Chinese
aggression. Both Indian and Chinese governments
denied the incidents (China Foreign Ministry,
2009), but such was the heat created by what one
editor called war-mongering TV channels (Gupta,
2009) that then National Security Advisor M.K.
Narayanan appeared on a television interview on
CNN-IBN with a dire warning:
I dont know what the reason is why there is so
much reporting but I think this is a national
security issue the more you raise peoples con-
cerns, the tensions could rise and we would then
Mehta 53
be facing a situation of the kind that we wish to
avoid [sic.]. It could create a problem of a kind
and I have been through [in] [the] 1962 [war]
then of course we didnt [then] have the media of
this kind.
What we need to be careful of is that we dont
have an unwarranted incident or an accident of
some kind, thats what we are trying to avoid. But
theres always concern that if this thing goes on
like this someone somewhere might lose his cool
and something might go wrong. (CNN-IBN, 2009)
That this statement came in a television interview
was no accident. The government was asking
Indias TV networks to tone down. Television was
seen to have largely led the debate; print was seen
to have followed. Anecdotal evidence certainly
supported this view. Among others, B.V. Rao, a
former TV news editor and media columnist, noted
that the government was asking the media to back
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off because this time the frenzy seemed to have
spread even to print [from television] (Rao, 2009).
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Whether the allegations about border incursions
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were true or not is outside the scope of this arti-
cle. Such shadowboxing between the media and
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the government on tricky issues is part of every
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democracy, and India is no exception to that. It is
pertinent for our purposes, however, that this was
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the second time in the year that Indias TV news
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networks were accused of side tracking bilateral
relations with another country.
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When a group of Indian students were injured in
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a racist attack in Melbourne in May 2009, the story
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was initially virtually ignored in the national
newspapers. It was first given prominence when
Times Now, one of the most popular 24-hour
satellite news channels in the country, ran an
emotional campaign around it. The network made
the story its first headline and ran a sustained
campaign about injured Indian pride. Times Nows
commercial success has been built on an aggressive
policy of pursuing stories with a nationalist angle
especially those involving nonresident Indians; a
hard line on security, especially on Pakistan and
China; and the notion of a powerful India, an India
that is no more a pushover. Television ratings show
that its audiences like that tone, and this, in turn,
affects its choice and treatment of stories. The
Australian racism story fitted its template very
well. Once it got traction and the Ministry of
External Affairs was forced to react, every other
media group, television and print, followed suit.
This is the nature of the mediathe story had
become too big for others to ignore (Wade, 2009).
The intense focus meant that every attack on
an Indian thereaftereven ones that were part
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of general crime patterns and not racistwere
framed through the same lens. Once such reports
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would have been relegated to the inside pages of
newspapers or, at best, would have made it to a
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box item on the front page. Now, they became part
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of an ongoing media discourse about a resurgent
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India that would not take things lying down.
At a time when Indo-Australian relations had
been on the upswing after years of historical
mistrust, the story upset the trajectory of bilat-
eral relations, with the Indian Foreign Minister,
facing middle class anger in television studios,
issuing warnings to Australia. The central role
of television in this discourse was best summed
up in a tongue-in-cheek account published in the
Hindustan Times:
Other countries have think-tanks, India makes do
with prime-time chat shows...
To media consumers who got initiated into
Australian society this past week, that country
must seem formidably scary, almost the fastness
of Ming of Mongo. There was discussion on a
white Australia policy that went out of business
30 years ago. Clips of Australian cricketers sledg-
ing or arguing with Indian, West Indian and Sri
Lankan cricketers were juxtaposed with report-
age of attacks on Indian students, as if one were
dealing with a nation of all-purpose bigots.
On one television show, an anchor said
Australia had been preceded by attacks on Indians
in Germany, the United States and Idi Amins
Uganda and wondered why the world hated
54 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)
Indians. This is a happy universe of nuance-free
non sequiturs.
Even so, Indias television-propelled middle
class opinion is a clear and present reality. It will
shape discourse that will hassle and harangue
governments, demand instant action and colour-
ful rhetoric. In some senses, the drama outside the
Delhi airport during the IC-814 hijack was a
teaser trailer. This is the new India. Now even
Kevin Rudd (then-Australian prime minister)
knows that. (Malik, 2009)
For our purposes, it is immaterial whether the tel-
evision coverage was right or wrong, nuanced or
simplistic, sensationalist or measured. The point
is that both the examples cited above underlined
the centrality of 24-hour private satellite news as a
new factor in the Indian political and social matrix.
In both cases, the discourse of Indian television
had serious consequences for domestic policy
imperatives and an impact beyond Indias bor-
ders. A detailed study of Indian news televisions
impact on foreign policy is still to be written, but
it is important to reiterate how recent the phenom-
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enon of private TV news is.
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This is a country where as late as 1994, a prime
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minister canceled the launch of a new state TV
channel because it promised to show live cur-
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rent affairs programs. Narasimha Raos reason-
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ing could not have been clearer: We cannot have
live broadcasts. It is too dangerous, he said, while
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cancelling the launch of DD 3 in October 1994
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(Ghose, 2005). The fear was that there would be no
way of controlling anybody from saying anything
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against the ruling Congress on live programming.
Historically, in India, control over television has
been central to the states self-imagebroadcast-
ings principal objective was to display and enact
government controland live television threat-
ened to break down the edifice on which Indian
television had been built.
Despite the best efforts of the Indian state to
resist the forces of change in the 1990s, India has
gone in two decades from just one state-owned
television network to over 800 licensed private
satellite channels. Most Indians, of course, did not
have TV sets till the mid-1990s. There were only
a grand total of 55 licensed TV sets in India when
Nehru died in 1964, about a lakh when Indira
Gandhi imposed the Emergency in 1975, and a lit-
tle over 2 million connections at the time of the
Asian Games in 1982. This is when the needle first
began shifting toward a truly national medium
and as many as 34 million families owned TV
sets by the time Manmohan Singh opened up the
economy in 1991 (Mehta, 2008, pp. 31, 4243).
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As a percentage of the population, though, this
was negligible. By 2014, however, about 65 per-
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cent of Indian households owned a television set
(MPA Asia, 2014) though more than half still did
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not have access to an indoor toilet.5
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Consider this: in 1992, if you divided Indias
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population (Registrar General of Indai, 2001) by
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the total number of television sets in the country,
the number of people clustering around a set would
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have been a little over 26.6 By 2014, that ratio had
come down substantially to just about 8 people per
television set, despite a substantial increase in the
population.7 In a little over two decades, the total
number of Indian television households jumped
almost five times to reach 160 million.8 It made
India the worlds third largest television market,
5
In July 2014, over 130 million Indian households did
not have indoor toilets, 72 percent of rural Indian still
defecated behind bushes and nearly 600 million were
living without toilets (The Economist, 2014).
6
India had 34,858,000 television sets in 1992 (Joshi &
Trivedi, 1994, p. 16).
7
There were estimated to be 160 million television sets
in India by 2014. The population had gone up to 1.26
billion according to Census and World Bank data.
8
The Indian Space Research Organisation estimated
34 million TV sets in 1991, the National Readership
Survey in 2006 estimated 112 million television sets
in the country, and industry estimates in 2014 placed
the number of television sets at 160 million.
Mehta 55
just behind China and the United States (PwC-
FICCI, 2008, p. 36).
There has been a simultaneous increase in
what people can actually see on these TV sets. In
2000, India had 132 television channels, by 2014
this number had gone up to over 800 licensed
channels in various languages.9 The first Indian
24-hour news channel only started broadcasting in
1998, but by 2014, almost half of the 800 or so
licensed channels in India were broadcasting news
in 15 languages and over 150 (in 11 languages)
were 24-hour news channels. Even the staid public
broadcaster Doordarshan, which ran only two
channels in 1997DD I and DD IIwas operating
as many as 35 channels by 2014.10 I have detailed
the political, economic, and social reasons behind
the remarkable rise of private Indian satellite
television in India on Television, but the massive
increase in numbers sharply illustrate the massive
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changes in Indian broadcasting (Mehta, 2008).
The power of television is even more potent
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now with the rise of the other device that has
grown faster than toilets in India: the mobile
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phone. Almost every Indian had a mobile phone
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by 2014 and the marriage between the internet
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9
2000 estimate is by Uday Shankar, CEO, Star India.
2014 channel data are from Total Number of TV
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Channels Goes up To 813, 2014; Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India,2014. While TRAI reported
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793 channels licensed by Ministry of Information
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and Broadcasting in July 2014, this number had
reached as high as 877 in 2013 but several licenses
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were canceled by the Ministry in 2013 due to lack of
use. At the same time, other sources from Ministry
of Information and Broadcasting in the same time
period, reported a total of 798 licensed channels.
Total number of Permitted TV channels in India as
of July is 798, I&B Ministry gave clearance to three
New Channels, August 5, 2014, http://telecomtalk.
info/total-number-of-tv-channels-in-india-as-of-
july798/120527/ (accessed on August 6, 2014). The
numbers keep fluctuating with several applications
pending with the Ministry.
10
Figures from Sircar (2014).
and the mobile phonestill very nascent but
large enough to be revolutionary in scope
had begun to fundamentally reshape the nature
of communications and media businesses. The
smarter television executives have already begun
redefining some of their leading soap operas
changing plot lines and charactersbased on the
real-time reactions they get from Twitter chatter
driven primarily through mobile phones.11 By
2013, more than 227 million were using mobile
phones or tablets to watch television, see films,
listen to music, or to see cricket (Kohli Khandekar,
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2013). More than half the Google downloads in
the country were for videos and this meant that
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television was becoming much more personalized
and reaching much further than ever before.
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The figures tell a story of Indias TV boom. But
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it is only half of the story. Within India, the growth
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of the medium unleashed new battles over control,
over media ownership and over who ultimately
controlled the public sphere. These questions are
especially important for a profession, whose very
existence depends on the rhetoric of public service
and probity. Its rise has had significant implica-
tions for Indian democracy, and its daily travails
as a business, as a cultural commodity, and as a
significant lever of society offer an unparalleled
view into the daily theater of India.
Television touches virtually everyone in Indian
society, but in the din of daily headlines, it is
important to delineate some fundamental ques-
tions. Who really owns Indian television? What
are the patterns of control nationally and across
regional languages? Are there any commonalities
across languages and regions? Can we discern
underlying trends that drive the business and what
are the politics? At a time when many believe, on
one side, that corporate India is buying up Indian
11
Uday Shankar, CEO Star TV and Sudhanshu Vats,
Group CEO Viacom 18 Media in conversation on
panel on Engaging a Billion Consumers in the Media
and Entertainment Industry, FICCI Frames March
12, 2013.
56 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)

television and, on the other, that ownership is
irrelevant because digital media have created an
information revolution which no one can control,
these questions are at the heart of the debate about
modern media. These are the questions this essay
seeks to answer.
Ownership Patterns in Indian
Television
Since 2008, Indias television map has changed
significantly with a spate of buyouts and moves
The second thing that stands out is how little
they control. The 61 percent viewing market share
of the big five companies might seem like a lot,
but not when one knows that this is the lowest
when compared with other countries with big
television industries.
The top five companies in the United States
control as much as 69 percent of the cable TV
market (and the top six companies almost 80
percent, if you calculate by revenue share) (Noam,
2009, p. 101); the top five in the United Kingdom
and Australia over 80 percent, and the top five in

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toward consolidation. This phase has coincided Canada almost 80 percent. In Japan, this is as high
with a greater corporatization of the industry, the as 92 percent, in Brazil, 77 percent, and in Italy

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availability of greater capital for expansion, and and Mexico, the top two companies control almost
with a realization that it is the regional markets everything (Figure 4). In international terms, Indian

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television remained a highly competitive and tough

where the primary growth lies.
The first thing that stands out when one looks
at the ownership map of India is that five players
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dominate the TV entertainment business: Star, Zee,
Sony, Sun, and Viacom. Between them, by 2012,
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market, despite the trend toward consolidation.
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Looking deeper into the Indian figures, no one
network controls more than 20 percent of the
national market. Only Star approached this mark

these five big players ran about 1012 percent12 of in 2012, while the other four hovered between 6
and 14 percent (see Figure 3). The share of the big
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all channels in the country and controlled about 61

percent of the viewing market (see Figure 3). five is distributed across nearly 100 individual
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Percentage Viewing Share of TV Market in 2012: Big Five

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Network All Hindi Andhra Karnataka Kerala Maharashtra West Tamil

India Pradesh Bengal Nadu
Star 19.0 22.5 4.4 13.7 32.8 21.6 25.5 7.6
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Zee 14.0 16.7 11.5 9.6 1.3 19.0 21.8 3.2

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Sony 12.1 15.8 3.2 3.5 1.7 15.3 10.5 1.6

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Sun 10.5 0.2 26.3 36.9 28.5 0.5 0 47.9

Viacom 6.6 8.8 1.6 1.9 0.9 7.6 5.7 0.4
TOTAL 61.0 64.0 47.0 65.6 65.2 64.0 63.5 60.7

Figure 3. Not Quite Masters of the Universe

Source: TAM CS4 data for JanuarySeptember 2012.13

12
In October 2012, Star TV broadcast 17 channels, Viacom 6, Sony 9, Sun Network 21, and the Zee Network 38.
This is a total of 91 which is 31 percent of the 831 channels officially licensed at the time. This figure does not
include the news channels controlled by Network 18.
13
Data from TAM, compiled and supplied by R. Padmasri, Star TV.
Mehta 57

Country-wise Percentage Viewing Share of Top Five Companies: Select Countries

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Figure 4. Why India is Better Off

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Source: International figures from Analysis Group, Vertical Integration in TV Broadcasting, and Distribution in G8 Countries
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and Certain Other Countries (August 7, 2012). http://dwmw.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/analysis-2012-vertical-

integration-tv-canada.pdf (accessed on September 30, 2012).
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channels, and if you drill down by language and by market share, in Marathi between 5 and 7 percent,
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channel, the picture gets much more complicated. and in Bengali between 12 and 15 percent.
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Two distinct models emerge. The first is Leadership in these languages is less about
marked by intense competition and fluctuating having one big dominant channel and more about
fortunes. Four language groups have remained building it incrementally by running a diverse
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locked in close contests where leads are slim: the line-up of different kinds of programming: general
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Hindi-speaking market, Kerala, West Bengal, and entertainment, music, movies, children-focused
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Maharashtra. Star is the leader in these languages,
but its next-best competitor in each group is within
56 percentage points. This is especially true in
Maharashtra where Star has remained neck-and-
neck with Zee. The key feature here is that, with the
exception of the Asianet channel in Kerala, which
alone accounts for one-fifth of the local market for
Star, no single channel (as opposed to media group)
in any language is so decisively ahead of its rival
to be uncatchable. For example, the largest channel
in Hindi hovers between 6.5 and 8.5 percent of the
channels. This is where conglomerates with
diverse offerings and deep pockets have a built-in
advantage and this is why standalone channels are
difficult to sustain.
The second model is one of complete network
dominance. This is the case in Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu where Sun has held
unparalleled sway. It is six times the size of its
nearest competitor in Tamil Nadu and more than
twice the size of the second-largest networks in
Karnataka and Andhra. In contrast to the states with
58 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)

close competition, Suns dominance in its three big
states is powered by the numero uno status of its
flagship channels. In Andhra, Suns Gemini TV is
nearly twice the size of the next big network Zee
Telugu. The same applies in Karnataka, where
Uday TV is nearly double its challenger Suvarna
TV. And for historical reasons, which go to the
heart of how its politics has evolved, Tamil Nadu
is a class apart. In 2012, Sun TVs astounding 31.5
percent share in its original home-ground dwarfed
the next best of Vijay TV which stood at a mere
6.5 percent.
This is an important question, and concerns about
consolidation are genuine. Yet much of this debate
has so far been conducted more with emotion
and ideology and less with facts. The data show
that with the exception of Tamil news, even the
most concentrated language markets in India still
remain more diverse than those in most other
countries where television is widespread.
To measure owner concentration in industries,
policy makers and scholars around the world
have, since the early 1980s, used a statistical
measure developed by two economists. The

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Linguistic boundaries and cultural and political HirfindalHirschman index (HH-I) measures owner
nuances give Sun such a leadership in these states, concentration. Its use became widespread after the

U
but it is precisely these boundaries and nuances US Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve
that prevent it from expanding outside its southern began using it to analyze the competitive effects of

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bastions and keep its national share where it is. mergers. The higher points a market scores on the

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What does all this amount to and how does index, the more concentrated is its ownership, the
Indian ownership diversity match global trends?
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lower the points, the more diverse the ownership. It
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How TV Ownership Concentration in Five Indian Languages Compares Internationally
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(H-I Index: Less is good)

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Figure 5. Problem Yes, But Not so Bad after All

Source: Indian figures from report for Ministry of Information and Broadcasting by Administrative Staff College of India, Study
on Cross Media Ownership in India. International figures from Noam, Media Ownership, and Concentration in America, p. 23.
Mehta 59
is not perfect, but it provides a universally accepted
method to measure market diversity.
By this measure, ownership concentration in
all Hindi news and entertainment channels as well
as English news channels in India is moderate and
remains among the most diverse in the world. A
2008 study for the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, which examined five language mar-
kets, found that the real problem was in Malayalam,
Tamil, and Telugu, which showed very high levels
of concentration. The Malayalam TV industry was
similar to the situation in Britain, but better than
in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. Tamil
news and Telugu entertainment were undoubtedly
among the most concentrated globally, but Tamil
entertainment appeared fairly diverse. The Telugu
news TV industry is similar to Britain, Sweden,
and Franceat least by these standards. Data for
other Indian languages are not available but see-
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ing the available Indian figures side by side with
international comparisons provides perspective
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(see data in Figure 5).
Yet statistical analysis of this kind provides at
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best an incomplete and at worst a misleading
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picture. To understand this, we must turn to the
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third key feature of Indian television: news
television. The trends in the business of news TV
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are remarkably different from those in the larger
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entertainment industry.
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A New Indian Power Elite: Who
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Owns the News and Why?
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As a genre, news attracts less than 10 percent of
viewership in India and only about 1617 percent
of advertising (FICCI-KPMG, 20102011, p. 20).
Yet more than half of the over 877 licensed TV
14
Of the 877 channels, licenses were canceled for
61 in 2013 by the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting due to non-fulfillment of license condi-
tions. Data on channels from Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting. Information on cancelations from
Cablequest (June 28, 2013).
channels in the country are news channels, and
one-third of these beam 24-hour news.14 This is a
bizarrely high ratio compared to other countries. It
is especially so when everyone in the industry
agreed that news channels had turned into finan-
cial black holes and enjoy a negligible market
share. Yet news channels kept getting launched
and money pumped into them.
Hardly any news channel in India made money.
With the exception of a handful of channels, most
news channels had never made money across their
whole life-cycles. As film-maker Prakash Jha, who
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started Maurya TV in Bihar, told an interviewer,
I was crazy to have entered the media business.
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It was the love for my state that inspired me to
launch the channel. But I am bleeding right now.
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My revenues dont even cover one-third of the cost
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of running it (Shukla, 2012).
CThree kinds of people have been major inves-
tors in news television in the past decade: poli-
ticians, real estate, chit fund and money market
companies, and large corporations. My research
shows that between them such companies make
up over 80 percent of the news TV business in
Andhra, Karnataka, and Orissa and between 60
and 70 percent in Punjab, Maharashtra, West
Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and the Northeast (see
Figure 6). A decade ago, only a handful of states
like Tamil Nadu had channels like Sun TV or Jaya
TV, which were set up as propaganda arms of
rival political parties. By 2013, this was the norm
across India.
Politicians got into the television business for
obvious reasons: to gain a platform to relay their
messages to voters. In Andhra Pradesh, only 23
of the 14 news channels are not controlled by
politicians or their proxies. The growth in news
was not driven by companies looking to create
new platforms for serious coverage but by power
players looking to spread their own propaganda
and views. From Sakshi TV of Jagan Reddy of
the YSR Congress to Captain TV of the Tamil
actor Vijaykanth, it was almost an unwritten
rule for new entrants on the political stage to
60 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)

Region Language Percentage

Odisha Oriya 90
Former Andhra Pradesh Telugu 83
Karnataka Kannada 82
Maharashtra Marathi 70
Tamil Nadu Tamil 66
West Bengal Bengali 6065
Northeastern states Assamese, Manipuri, Mizo 6065
Kerala Malayalam 56
Punjab Punjabi, Hindi 60

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North Indian states Hindi 40
Figure 6. Television-News Companies Owned by Politicians, Corporations and Real Estate/Chit-Fund/Personal-

U
Finance Companies in Selected Regions and Language Areas

L
Source: The calculations are based on Ministry of Information and Broadcasting records, publicly available information on listed

IA
TV companies, media reports and industry interviews in select states.15

announce their arrival by launching their own

C
into their party office, as one news editor put it?
ER
TV channel. (Mishra, 2012).
By itself, this should not necessarily be a The case for politicians being in television is
M

problem. Politicians have a right to free speech, simple enough: a voice for their political interests.
and in theory at least, various propaganda voices But it is the capture of news television by big busi-
M

should cancel each other out. The trouble, however, nesses and real-estate and chit-fund kinds of finan-
O

was twofold. First, this trend loaded the democratic ciers that complicates the picture far more. Their
C

field in favor of those with access to big, under-the- dominance of the news space and the influence it
table funding and crowded out less wealthy players. gives them tells us a great deal about the new
R

Second, the easy money that politicians brought power structures of India.
FO

into the game distorted the market and drove out all There is nothing abnormal about businesses
serious neutral players. In a market where virtually owning the news: business houses and news have
T

no one made money anyway, the arrival of new been intertwined the world over. Within India
O

rivals rich with cash and with no need to make itself, some of the biggest newspapers have always
money squeezed out genuine players or forced them been owned by industrial barons with deep pock-
N

to make dubious alliances to survive. ets and multiple interests in other sectors. What is
As one heavy investor in news TV in Andhra striking is the kind of businesses that began to get
Pradesh told a newspaper reporter, What began into TV news in India and their similarities.
as an opportunity has become a liability. There are The first variety includes companies with inter-
too many news channels in the market, mostly run ests in real estate: construction, housing develop-
in an unprofessional manner by owners who have ment, hotels, and infrastructure. A large number also
interests beyond media (Shukla, 2012). And there run chit funds and collective investment schemes
was, of course, the question of what happened (Shukla, 2009, 2012). These are businesses which
to news when politicians convert the newsroom require either a great deal of political patronage, as
15
The numbers were accurate in January 2013. There are limitations in such calculations because of the opacity of data
on non-listed companies, but interviews confirm that the numbers reflect an accurate picture of ownership trends.
Mehta 61
anything do with land in India does, and also gen-
erate a great deal of black money. Ab to builder
chala rahe hai news channels [builders are run-
ning news channels now], sums up Arun Jaitley,
Union Finance Minister in the Modi government.
This has serious implications for what the channels
actually show. As Jaitley observed:
The economic model of news channels is still not
adequate. Therefore, barring a few channels, or
some channels which have a very large regional
base, and a handful of national channels, news
channels per se are not a profitable business. In
fact most of them are making losses. That com-
pulsion is pushing the concept of paid news and
some recent cases are far more disturbing than
even paid news.16
For many of these channels, the boundaries
between them and politics are often so porous that
ER
they are almost impossible to map. A news chan-
nel is a useful asset. It brings influence and access,
M
and opens doors in politics and in government,
M
says one senior television manager.17
The second category includes large corporate
O
companies. The most striking example was the deal
C
that gave Indias largest corporate entity, Reliance
Industries Limited, ownership of one of the coun-
R
trys largest regional language news enterprises,
FO
Eenadu TV, and Network18and its subsidiary
TV18the listed entity which controls channels
T
such as CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz, CNN-IBN,
O
IBN7, and IBN-Lokmat. In effect, it initially com-
N
16
Personal interview with Arun Jaitley. At the time of
the interview, he was the Leader of Opposition in
Rajya Sabha, October 21, 2012.
17
Personal interview with a senior TV consultant
who has launched several regional TV networks but
declined to be named.
18
In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly,
the journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi
Chaturvedi (2012) argued that this combined new
entity would be larger than the Rupert Murdoch-
controlled Star TV and the Bennett and Coleman
Company that controls the Times of India Group.
bined two major media groups to create what many
thought was Indias largest media conglomerate.18
Mukesh Ambanis acquisition of a big share in
the TV news market ostensibly to gain content
for Reliances mobile phone service Jiowas not
the only manifestation of a wider trend. In May
2012, another major Indian conglomerate with
deep interests in telecom, the Aditya Birla Group,
announced that it was acquiring a 27.5 percent
stake in Living Media India Limited (Aditya Birla
Group, 2012), the company which runs the India
Today Group, including several channels such as
SE
Aaj Tak and Headlines Today. In this case, though,
full control remained in the hands of India Today
U
chairman Aroon Purie. Similarly, in December
2011, Oswal Green Tech, acquired a 14.17 per-
L
cent shareholding in New Delhi Television in two
IA
separate deals from the investment arms of Merrill
C
Lynch and Nomura Capital (Guha Thakurta &
Chaturvedi, 2012, p. 12).
In 1956, C. Wright Mills argued in his classic
The Power Elite that a small social class of influ-
ential people was taking over the key institu-
tional command posts of American society, the
places where the decisions are made and which
have the most direct influence on the course
of events in society. Arguing that the power of
wealth was not nearly as important as the insti-
tutional powers of wealth, Mills showed that a
small coalition of big businessmen and ascend-
ant military men had come to occupy the levers
of power in the American social system with no
effective counterweight. The key insight of this
argument was that the idea of democracy, where
different viewpoints competed in the market-
place of ideas and the best argument eventually
won, was more a fairy tale than a useful approx-
imation (Mills, 1958).
India in the twenty-first century is a very
different place from the United States of the
1950s, but the example of news television shows
us that we may be seeing a similar move on to the
strategic command posts of the society. Such a
move came from politicians and businesses with
62 Emerging Economy Studies 1(1)
interests in real estate, chit-funds, or personal
finance schemes. News TV channels have emerged
as vital platforms and crossroads of Indian society
and one of its most influential lightning rods in the
public sphere. The power elite that emerged in the
1990s understood this and staked a claim to this
powerful social lever.
A new mediaindustrial complex was coming
into being, somewhat like the militaryindustrial
complex that emerged in the United States in the
1950s. The structure of the news TV business
changed in the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury. It led to a furious public debate about media
ownership, regulation, and content with various
bodies like the Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India, the Law Commission, and various minis-
tries weighing in with their own views on what
should be done. Most of these flounder on the
question of whether old regulations based on tra-
ER
ditional categories of print, television, and internet
remain relevant in the age of convergence and the
M
mobile phone. The debate is far from resolved and
past experience shows that it is difficult to trust
M
governmental bodiesof any ideological persua-
O
sionto be neutral arbiters on media matters. One
C
thing though is certain: media plurality remains
the best defense against media capture. As Mao
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said, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred
FO
schools of thought contend.
T
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Authors Biography
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Nalin Mehta is Associate Professor, Shiv Nadar University, Consulting Editor, Times of
C

India, and Editor, South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) as well as the Routledge
book series by the same name. He has previously been Managing Editor, Headlines Today,
R

Adjunct Professor, Indian Institute of Management, and held senior positions with the UN and
FO

Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently on the governing board of the University
Grants Commission Consortium for Educational Communication, which coordinates the
work of 22 universities centres nationwide. He has held fellowships at National University
T

of Singapore, Australian National University, Canberra, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and

O

the International Olympics Museum, Lausanne.

N

His books include India on Television: How Satellite Channels Have Changed the Way We
Think and Act (HarperCollins: 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Asian Publishing Award for Best Book; Sellotape
Legacy:Delhi and the Commonwealth Games (HarperCollins: 2010), with Boria Majumdar; Olympics: The India
Story (HarperCollins: 2008, 2012 and republished Routledge: 2008). Hisedited books include Television in India:
Satellites, Politics and Cultural Change (Routledge: 2008, 2010);Gujarat Beyond Gandhi: Identity, Conflict and
Society (Routledge: 2010, 2011) with Mona G. Mehta
His forthcoming book Behind a Billion Screens: Inside Indian Television is in press with HarperCollins.