The end of short wave?
Since FM radio is not yet open for news broadcast by private players in India, BBC's short wave service remains the only independent source of information for a large mass of the population having little or no access to Internet and private TV channels. In 2007, there were 19.1 million listeners of BBC shortwave service which fell to 11 million by 2010 and are now unofficially estimated at 8.5 million. Despite the declining numbers, mostly from urban areas, the coverage is significant and continues to form the largest language audience of the BBC World Service after English.
But now the closing down of state bureaus will confine the whole staff to Delhi with major focus on the BBC Hindi website. BBC is also looking at online and mobile options to make the radio content reach its audiences digitally besides reaching out to worldwide Hindi audience. Such a shift in focus will inevitably target a smaller population segment of urban, more technically advanced audience which ironically has access to multiple sources of information. Tyagi, however, believes that across India, the number of internet users is now more than the people who use short wave radios. “If you look at the forecasts for digital media, you notice that robust growth is already under way in tier 2/3 cities, where the first language is not English. It is important we make BBC Hindi available to those audiences too, and we are making a good progress here,” he said in an e-mail reply.
“Keeping up with the times” was also the motto adopted by Voice of America and German broadcaster Deutshe Welle when they put an end to their Hindi in 2008 and 2011 respectively. However, more than the wish to take content to the new segment, it’s the necessity to reduce costs that is pushing hands of broadcasters.
In case of BBC World Service, it will cease to receive grant-in-aid from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office from April 2014 onwards and will instead be largely dependent on the annual licence fee collected from the British residents owning TV sets. A six-year freeze on hike in licence fee has made matters worse. Starting 2011, BBC closed down several language services, made job cuts, replaced permanent full-time employments with short-term contract-based tenures and shifted focus from radio to “future mediums” including online, television and mobile.
Starting 2011 when transmission in seven languages, including Russian and Mandarin, was announced. In 2012, English short wave service was reduced, from between 7 and 19 hours a day depending on the region, to six hours per day, Arabic short wave service in the Middle East except Sudan was closed, Arabic and English medium wave services were reduced in the Middle East and a short wave transmitting station was shut down in Cyprus. On the other hand, "Future media, transmission and distribution" was the only sector in which BBC World Service registered a rise in operating expenditure from 2010-11 to 2011-12.
This was done with the argument that short wave listeners have declined while there is growth in audiences on TV and digital media. However, this policy shift does not bode well with countries like India. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament recognised this fact in its December 2012 meeting with Peter Horrocks, the BBC Global News Director. “We believe that the World Service must continue to take into account significant audiences in certain parts of the world, such as rural India and Africa, who currently rely on short-wave radio,” it said while noting that cost per user figures for radio broadcasts were highly cost-effective in comparison to those for TV or online mediums. Horrocks also admitted that financial pressures had occasionally forced the World Service's hand, pushing it to make changes sooner than might have been ideal.
The BBC Hindi service was earlier scheduled to close down in 2011 along with five other language transmissions but was given a reprieve by the foreign Parliament's committee citing India's emergence as a rising economic power and need to improve bilateral relations with the country on priority basis. Mark Tully, whose name is synonymous with BBC in India, led a campaign against closure of the Hindi service in 2011. Talking to The Hoot, he says a large segment of listeners will still be affected if BBC decides to curtail or completely close down short wave transmission.
Short wave service, though costlier to maintain, offers more editorial independence as it cannot be intercepted and clamped down on through censorship, unlike internet and FM. In fact, BBC recently got into an ugly spat in Sri Lanka with the state-owned broadcasting corporation which repeatedly censored its FM retransmission related to the UN Human Rights Council's session on war crimes in the island nation.
On to future media
Though news and current affairs programmes are not allowed on FM, BBC has partnerships with private FM networks for broadcast of its magazine programmes on their platforms. It is also producing a weekly television programme, Global India, which is broadcasted by ETV. For the last one year, BBC has been further developing the online offer, including on mobile. However, Tyagi says this does not mean radio is being ignored. “We have launched a new morning radio programme on short wave, 'Namaskar Bharat'. All three platforms are important as our audience is increasingly seeking news across radio, TV, digital and mobile,” he said adding that BBC would consider other opportunities if news were to be an option on FM.
“We will continue to play on our strengths, high quality journalism and an ability to reach audiences on a range of platforms. We can bring the whole range of the BBC’s journalism from across the globe including stories as diverse as Brazil and India competing on beef exports, and the impact of IPL on county cricket in England. We also provide original stories in Science, Technology, Health and Environment from around the world,” Tyagi said. However, the fact is that it’s the credible coverage of domestic rather than international events that earned BBC its loyal audience. Starting from wars with China and Pakistan, Bangladesh Liberation War to The Emergency years, Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination (BBC broke the story) and anti-Sikh riots, the radio service offered unbiased coverage unlike the state-controlled All India Radio. And things have hardly changed.
“It is widely projected that India today has a free and fair media which represents the interests of most countrymen. However, as evident, the urban-centric mainstream media is not free from influence of the market and politics and hardly represents the rural masses. This is why a credible and easily accessible information source like BBC short wave service with its in-depth coverage is as much needed today as it was in the past,” says Naleen Kumar, a former BBC staffer.
Glorious past to uncertain future
It was on May 11, 1940, that the first Hindi transmission of BBC crackled to life after Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister of Britain. Named as the BBC Hindustani Service, it was targeted mainly at soldiers from the subcontinent who were serving the British war effort in the second World War. The Hindustani service was partitioned with the country in 1947 and the Hindi Service was relaunched in January 1949. Former Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral also tried his broadcasting skills in the Hindi Service during the 1950s.
In mid-90s, BBC Hindi started increasing its footprint in India with a full-fledged office in Delhi and a correspondent in several Indian states. These one-man bureaus were also the eyes and ears on the ground for the BBC World Service English which had no state correspondent of its own. However, things started changing when in 2009, the Chandigarh and Ahmedabad bureaus were shut down while Srinagar, Kolkata, Jammu, Jaipur, Bhopal were closed in 2011. On this issue Tyagi said: “BBC Hindi is changing the base of its regional correspondents so that we can make more effective India wide deployments for all our output and we are also developing a nationwide stringer network.” However, skeptics believe this will impact the coverage from regions which also have maximum listeners of BBC Hindi.
The job cuts
The main reason for closing down of regional bureaus is seen by old timers as a step to replace full-time permanent positions with short-tenure employees attuned to digital media. The corporation recently advertised for post of multimedia producer with one-year contract.
According to sources, the present five regional correspondents were asked to shift to Delhi or face termination of services. While Mumbai and Raipur correspondents concurred, others refused transfer on the same pay scale citing significant difference between living costs of the national capital and their present stations. The corporation also denied them redundancy benefit on the pretext that it was not closing down positions but offering transfer.
After a round of negotiations, the correspondents have now been offered 15 days salary per year of service as compensation, which is half of what the BBC's redundancy policy provides. Tyagi, however, stressed that BBC is a responsible employer and will treat any staff not transferring location in an “appropriate manner”.
This story first appeared on The Hoot
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