By Vinod Mathew
It is all about the dialectics of change in the Indian media. The novelty is that for once this change is not being triggered by anything that is happening in the urban pockets of the country. On the contrary, it is the emerging rural reality that is making this happen, leading to a virtual urban-rural stand off.
Just as the burgeoning numbers of business enterprises in the country are eyeing the rural market to sell their merchandise, the media, too, is following suit. This has led to a bit of an upheaval in the media business, per se, with various permutations and combinations being tried out by some of the leading players.
Though it is early days yet, if there is a single noteworthy fallout from this churning, it is the birth of a new genre of communication that could be labelled the `alternative media' till a better term is coined by the pundits.
Media is all about people, as altruism goes. And in India, with over 70 per cent of its 1,043 million population living in the rural regions, media, to a large extent ought to be catering to the rural mass. Unfortunately, that is far from the truth as media in India, as in most parts of the world, caters to the urban masses.
Here, we are talking about media of the urban, by the urban and very much for the urban people, with occasional forays into the rural world. And largely, these rural forays take place at instances of disasters and human tragedies as happened in the case of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, when hordes of media, both national and international, made it their mission to hotfoot it to the remotest corners of rural Gujarat. And one has not heard of those villagers ever since.
Rural India is worth looking at as a case study because of its sheer size and spread, and its variety of culture, language, polity, religion and customs. Imagine the clubbing together of some of the major European countries, on the one side, and India, on the other, for the sake of comparison. One is talking about the plight of nearly 700 million people living in nearly 600,000 villages spanning over 150 million households.
The rural reportage by the Indian media, as and when it happens, is conceptualised and executed with the urban reader /viewer in mind. This can easily be labelled as a `Zoo Story' syndrome, where the media looks at its rural constituents as case studies and objects of analysis within a larger picture, its fulcrum being quite urban-centric.
Meanwhile, Rural India, has come into its own as a potential market for the big business houses. True, the per capita income here still hovers in the $240-300 range as against the great Indian Middle Class of some 50 million that is already in the $3,000-5,000 category. But the latter pales into insignificance as sheer numbers advocate the merchant princes to concentrate on the rural expanse for volumes.
Thus you find many a manufacturer, both the made-in-India variety and the MNCs, squeezed by thinning margins and falling demand, turning to the hitherto untapped market called Rural India to sell their wares. Therefore, the new buzz heard in the headquarters of many corporate giants in the cities is rural marketing and e-connectivity to the villages as tools for deeper market penetration.
There are a few e-initiatives that are already successful like the e-Choupal of Indian Tobacco Company (ITC) that has already hooked up one million farmers and traded till date over 1,20,000 tonnes of products and done business worth $100 million.
The company, seeing the business sense in this communication model mounted on local language platforms, is looking at raising its present reach of 9,000 villages to 1,00,000 villages and some 1,500 kiosks to 20,000 kiosks over the next 10 years. Then there is the much-documented Amul model, the marketing initiative of the rural farmers of India, that has today grown to be the single largest food company in the country.
The Indian farmers have built a Rs 30-billion company that has put to shame some of the global giants such as Nestle and Levers in product-specific categories.
However, not all can afford to build such dedicated marketing tools for themselves as vehicles to sell their wares in the rural world. It is in this context that the relevance of a common use, multiple access entry tool for the marketing of products in rural India gains importance. And it is precisely for these reasons that an alternative media is lumbering itself into a state of wakefulness.
Thus, it is as per the script penned as a response to the marketing needs of the great Indian bazaar called Rural India, more than anything else, that this new media variant has dared to grow.
Significantly, this process of change is beginning at the grassroots level, where the merchant princes are using the local reach of cable TV to sell their wares in small hick-towns and overgrown villages that are today connected by the television. And catalysing this change will be the optic fibre cable (OFC) network that is soon going to connect the remotest corners of the country.
Clearly, what began primarily as a movie channel with religious discourses in the morning and a smattering of song and dance sequences, again from the movies, as fillers, is now threatening to metamorphose itself into a new genre of communication.
Here, one is not talking of some futuristic model as it has already been tried out successfully during the December 2002 Gujarat Assembly elections. If anything, the Gujarat experiment with alternative media has proven beyond doubt how potent a communication vehicle it can turn out to be.
It is now history that almost the entire mainstream media, both national and international, had as good as written the epitaph of the ruling party following the communal carnage and the build-up to the polls that followed in Gujarat. There was a great schism between the local and the national media as the latter had predicted a rout of the ruling party in the election a few months later but was found to be badly out of sync with the ground reality.
The fact of the matter is that the ruling party, having comprehended that it had an invaluable vehicle to reach out to the rural masses in the form of cable TV, used it to the hilt. It was a clear case of an urban-rural divide, with the media caught in the crossfire and the Indian mainstream media, per se, failing to feel the pulse of the rural masses.
Thus, the Gujarat elections of 2002 must have been the first documented instance of the emergence of an alternative media in India.
Clearly, the alternative media, with the business houses keen on building marketing links to the rural world, on the one hand, and the telecommunications explosion allowing cable TV access to some of the remotest corners of the country, on the other, is ready for launch. While it is still at a nascent stage and it is only in bits and pieces that it has been utilised by market forces, it is merely a matter of time before its immense potential becomes evident to one and all.
The present model has the cable TV being run on a subscription base, often at astronomical rates for the customers that seems to be climbing rather than coming down.
However, it may not take long before the big business houses see the wisdom of pushing for a new model that could be significantly cheaper for the customer but ensures deeper market penetration for their products.
The sheer scale of economy inherent in such a mechanism may soon give birth to an option that no one in the Indian media business be able to ignore any longer. Simply put, it may be too big a business opportunity for the mainstream media houses to ignore as one is talking of a definite reach into the rural India's households.
Summing up, the media, as far as rural India is concerned, has been hitherto conspicuous by its absence in a meaningful way. This was true in the case of the print media of yore as it is in the case of the audio-visual media of today, barring a few exceptions where space was diligently dedicated to the rural world on a consistent basis.
On the other hand, even as the mainstream media has chosen to be urban-centric and left the rural masses to fend for itself by way of a comprehensive media vehicle, the rural world may have found a communication tool that suits its needs.
It is not that the Indian publication industry has not tried to make inroads into the rural world. Many have started out with regional supplements and later consolidated these into full-fledged regional editions. Some have even donated dish antennae in areas where they had their reach with the printed word, the next step being the launch of local language news coverage through the cable TV. Thus, the next phase could see the print media forging alliances of various hues and colours with local TV channels in a bid to stay in touch at the grassroots level.
At the end of the day, there are no readymade answers as to how the mainstream media can face up to this challenge as each entity would have to fashion a response tailor-made to suit one's peculiar market compulsions.
What is true is that much of this response would depend on the degree of preparedness with which each entity faces up to these challenges. And a big step forward would come from researching this new phenomenon, rather turning a blind eye to the development.
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