Breaking Down News: Radio Therapy

Narendra Modi’s message on his radio programme, Mann Ki Baat, is persuasive.

“Press red for Bolly,” Fox Sports exhorted South Asian viewers in Australia on the day of the World Cup semi-finals with India. Pressing the red button on the remote produced absolutely nothing filmi, though. It pulled up a Hindi commentary from Star India, featuring Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Sanjay Manjrekar, Shoaib Akhtar and Harsha Bhogle. The red button has had much success with rugby and footy, but language is a different ball game altogether. If the Hindi gambit worked, will Fox do Tamil next? Does it want to be multicultural, like BBC radio? Good heavens, has it forgotten its core values?

When the Opposition refuses to listen, it’s nice to have a captive radio station that reaches the last radish field. When Parliament took a break, Narendra Modi took the land bill issue to the people in Mann ki Baat. But did he connect? Modi’s message is persuasive: industrialising the countryside will create rural jobs and reduce pressure on the landless to migrate to urban slums; for that to happen, farmers should be ready to barter their land for local opportunity. But farmers have to think of opportunity cost, too. They are painfully aware that land is all they have, and the idea of giving it up in the precarious present for unquantifiable future gain must seem rash. The PM’s tone was off key, and he still hasn’t learned that it isn’t a good idea to belittle those who disagree with him.

The last time he did that was in Parliament, when he scorned Sitaram Yechury’s political forebears for telling the poor that the cars of the rich ran not on petrol but on their blood. The charge was completely true, and Yechury hit back to deeply embarrass the government. He led the demand to amend the response of the House to the President’s address, highlighting the lack of action on black money. Before that, the BJP had disparaged the Aam Aadmi Party and were blown away in the Delhi election.

Now, riddle me this: India offers a vast listener base. It is almost impossible to find a human in motion who does not have buds jammed in his or her ears, and a car may lack basic safety features but will have a stereo system with sternum-vibrating bass reverb. And we are still listening to FM?

Norway, with a relatively insignificant listener base, has less than 1 per cent of audio services on analog. Tiny Malta led Europe in switching to high-quality DAB+. All India Radio has played with digital transmission but made little headway, apparently for want of receivers at the right price point. What, DAB cards can’t be baked into cheap Indian smartphones?

A decade ago, the success of Worldspace showed that India, which always loved radio, is waiting for a revolution. After it failed, periodic rumours of its return inspired cries of millennial joy and even prayers to Krishna and Vishnu on social media. Today, India has the mobile user base to support digital radio in its many forms. But mystifyingly, the revolution is not being broadcast.

Source:: Indian Express