HISTORY OF RADIO JOURNALISM IN INDIA

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting

Broadcasting began in India with a private radio service in Madras in 1924. In the same year, the British colonial government granted a license to a private company, the Indian Broadcasting Company, to open Radio stations in Bombay and Calcutta. The company went bankrupt in 1930 but the colonial government took over and started operating them as the Indian State Broadcasting Corporation. In 1936, the Corporation was renamed All India Radio (AIR) and placed under the Department of Communications. When India became independent in 1947, AIR was made a separate Department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. National integration and the development of a "national consciousness" were among the early objectives of All India Radio. Broadcasting, was especially expected to contribute to the process of social modernization. television was introduced in 1959. The government had been reluctant to invest in television until then because it was felt that a poor country like India could not afford the medium. Television had to prove its role in the development process. Television broadcasts started from Delhi in September 1959 as part of All India Radio's services. Programs were broadcast twice a week for an hour a day on such topics as community health, citizens duties and rights, and traffic and road sense. In 1961 the broadcasts were expanded to include a school educational television project. In time, Indian films and programs consisting of compilation of musicals from Indian films joined as the first entertainment programs. A limited number of old U.S. and British shows were also telecast sporadically. In 1975, the government carried out the first test of the possibilities of satellite based television through the SITE program. SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) was designed to test whether satellite based television services could play a role in socio-economic development. television programs were beamed down for about 4 hours a day . The programs dealt mainly with in- and out-of-school education, agricultural issues, planning and national integration. the lessons learnt from SITE were used by the government in designing and utilizing its own domestic satellite service INSAT, launched in 1982. By 1976, the government constituted Doordarshan, the national television network. 1976 witnessed a significant event in the history of Indian television, the advent of advertising on Doordarshan. Commercialization of Doordarshan saw the development of soap operas, situation comedies, dramas, musical programs, quiz shows. 1991 saw International satellite television was introduced in India by CNN through its coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. Three months later Hong Kong based StarTV (now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.) started broadcasting five channels into India using the ASIASAT-1 satellite. Taking advantage of the growth of the satellite television audience, a number of Indian satellite based television services were launched between 1991 and 1994, prominent among them ZeeTV, the first Hindi satellite channel.