Ten minutes before the hour at the CNBC newsroom in Delhi, and the presenters are preparing themselves to go live. News readers with glossy, blow-dried hair trip across the marble floors in kitten heels; executives wearing expensive jeans pace the office, shouting instructions to rows of minions sitting on lurid purple chairs, silently monitoring developments on their screens.
Away from the action, in a back office, India's best-known television news anchor is preoccupied with bigger thoughts than the hourly broadcast. The anchor, Rajdeep Sardesai, has quit the limelight to set up a 24-hour TV news station, aiming to tap into India's apparently insatiable desire for new channels and more news.
Ten years ago, the highlight of an evening watching Indian television would have been the 9 o'clock news broadcast on the main state-run channel, Doordarshan, one of just five or six channels available in most households with a television set. This was a staid, 26-minute bulletin that showed a few pictures of politicians cutting ribbons but focused mainly on the face of the news reader as he broadcast the script.
Now, among the more than 200 channels available to those who have cable, there are around 30 continuous news channels - four in English, the rest in regional languages. Thirteen of them broad- cast nationwide. Their pace is swift, their screens littered with ticker bulletins, flashing headlines and Bollywood trivia. Indian television and print media have escaped the slump experienced by the industry in the rest of the world over the past four years. As media organizations around the world lay off staff, this seems to be a good time to be a journalist in India. News companies are expanding rapidly, poaching staff from rival organizations and scraping around to recruit new reporters.
"There is no parallel in any other country in the world," said Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the Center for Media Studies in New Delhi. "Even in the space of less than two years, we've seen the number of rolling news channels triple."
More channels are starting up by the month. The best-selling newspaper in the country, The Times of India, plans to start a 24-hour English-language news channel this year. Sardesai also hopes to start transmitting this year, sometime in the fourth quarter.
"It is a tough market, and there is scope for failure," Sardesai conceded, "but there are just two major English-language channels at the moment, so we see space here."
India's mounting obsession with news is fueled, media commentators say, by a new climate of political flux and by the economic transformation of the past decade.
"Until 1996, Indian politics was dominated by one party," said Naveen Surapaneni, an analyst with the media center. "Since then we've seen a string of frequent elections. There are more political players and more uncertainty, which has boosted the demand for news."
Since India's government started to open up its economy in 1991, the country has undergone a transformation, from state-run planned economy to one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia.
The changing economic backdrop has intensified this thirst for news, as people search for information about how their lives are to be changed by new policies and new trends. More important, it has generated the ad revenue to pay for the expensive process of gathering and transmitting news.
A large-scale liberalization of the telecommunications sector in the early 1990s made it possible for companies to establish the necessary infrastructure, and digital developments and the falling price of satellite technology have accelerated the proliferation of channels.
How profitable the new ventures will be is unclear. English-language programming accounts for less than 1 percent of total television viewership in the country, and English-language news has just one-tenth the viewership of Hindi news channels.
In absolute numbers, however, its potential reach is still fairly large, with perhaps 15 million homes already equipped with satellite systems. And English-language channels are considered highly influential, attracting disproportionately high levels of advertising revenue.
Advertisers like to pay for slots on news channels because, they say, people watching news are more attentive than those watching for entertainment.
There is also a perception that heads of households - the person responsible for major spending decisions - is more likely to be watching. While news accounts for just 6 percent of the time the average Indian spends watching television, it attracts 12 percent of total advertising revenue, or $100 million annually.
But some say the quality of the product has fallen because of the speed of expansion, and they forecast that not all the channels will last.
"There's no doubt that the industry is expanding, but it's not clear that these channels are maintaining the quality of content," said Annu Anand, associate editor of the Press Institute of India.
"There's been such a growth that the new companies are forced to hire cheap and very inexperienced journalists, many of whom have had no training. Ethical standards are dropping, and advertising is creeping into news. It won't be possible for all these companies to survive."
Sardesai, 40, who made his name as a reporter for the leading English-language news channel, NDTV, said he was confident the new business would make money. In collaboration with TV 18, he and his colleagues have already raised $15 million for the first three years of operations. TV18 has a joint venture with CNBC's 24-hour business-news operation, where Sardesai's business is temporarily based.
Once the channel, yet to be named, is up and running, he said, they hope to raise further revenue by selling packages of news to foreign cable channels, catering to the Indian expatriate population in the United States, Britain, South Africa and the Gulf.
"There is always the fear that we have reached saturation point, so we have to make ourselves different to the rest," Sardesai said. "The only way to do this is to be less Delhi-centric and give more local news."
Sardesai conceded that because television news in India is such a young industry, many of the reporters thrust into prominence lack experience, but he said the trade-off was the "energy" visible in the CNBC newsroom.
Meanwhile, Indian politicians are still getting used to the role that television news now plays in the democratic process. Ten years ago, Sardesai said, "You were only seen on TV if you were in government. The opposition never got any space." Now television has become the place for political discussions that do not take place in Parliament, he said, creating a generation of media-savvy politicians.
"We're not at the American presidential system yet, where television determines results," he said. "Manmohan Singh is tedious on television, and that hasn't stopped him from being prime minister. But television now plays an important role in shaping the political debate."
