New Delhi: A settlement regarding the future of the financially unsound Prasar Bharati is in the offing under which the facade of autonomy of the broadcasting corporation may be done away with and its role as a purely public broadcaster reassured.
The lack of space in the private electronic media for public interest and social issues has prompted this feeling, sources in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting told UNI.
The Group of Ministers set up the restructuring of the Corporation wants to finish its job fast and has asked Information and Broadcasting Minister to spell out various options soon to make the corporation financially viable and redefine its role, according to sources in the Ministry.
They did not rule out changes in the Act.
The GoM, headed by Home Minister Shivraj Patil, was set up last year to review the Prasar Bharati Broadcasting Corporation's performance and look into the grievances of its 45,000 employees.
The Group at its last meeting held on August 31, 2006 asked Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi to start outlining the roadmap right away.
One of the most favoured options is to inject more of public interest content into its programming and consequently pump in more of public money to end its financial difficulties.
The resulting scenario will be the AIR and Doordarshan reverting almost to their previous roles and being, for a fair part, funded by the government.
The autonomy Act was passed by Parliament in 1990 after the Supreme Court ruled that airwaves were public property and could not be monopolised.
The judgment came at a time when AIR and Doordarshan were the only broadcasters and a need was strongly felt to have reflection of variety of views and perspectives in their news and other programming.
However, the media scene has undergone a sea change in the last 15 years and airwaves are now dominated by private players,-a scenario in which the space for social issues has shrunken.
The situation has prompted a thinking in the government that All India Radio and Doordarshan should provide space to public interest issues, as no private media organisation was going to do that.
The view that has emerged after about three meetings of the GoM is that the government should come to Prasar Bharati's rescue if it wants to make it devote greater time to programmes dominated by public interest content.
But that would require the government to come out with a road map for meeting financial requirements of running such a public broadcaster.
The Information and Broadcasting Ministry would soon be holding a series of internal meetings to sort out these issues, according to sources. The Prasar Bharati employees too are sore over the manner of the implementation of the Prasar Bharati act. One of their main demands are restoration of facilities they were getting before the corporation was formed.
The employees have been demanding amendment in the Prasar Bharati Act, so that the public broadcaster is fully financed through the Consolidated Fund of India, just like autonomous Constitutional bodies like UPSC, Supreme Court of India, Election Commission etc.
They want the prevailing uncertainty about the status of employees be removed immediately and benefits of government service to Akashvani and Doordarshan employees be restored.
The Ministry now does not want to linger on the issues as all these problems of employees arising out of AIR and Doordarshan coming under a coproration have remained unsolved, the sources said.
The government had constituted a committee, headed by the I B Secretary, in March last year for suggesting a viable capital and financial structure for Prasar Bharati to strengthen its functioning.
The committee has dealt and deliberated on the restructuring options available and submitted its report. Its recommendations have been considered by the GoM.
Now it is for the Information and Broadcasting Minister to choose the options.
