January-March 2015 Volume 7 Issue 1 Rs 50 Why Media ‘On the Margins’ Needs to Be Strengthened
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A JOURNAL OF THE PRESS INSTITUTE OF INDIA ISSN 0042-5303 January-March 2015 Volume 7 Issue 1 Rs 50 Why media ‘on the margins’ needs to be strengthened Does all that is happening and should be of interest to the taxpaying public get reported through conventional, mainstream media? It’s media ‘on the margins’ which CONTENTS does not have a wide readership that plays an important • A double whammy for poor role exposing malpractices. It is these ‘margins’ that need women / Susan Philip nourishing and strengthening if the fabric at the centre is • When Good Samaritans can to be safeguarded, says Sakuntala Narasimhan. The be devious / Susan Philip ball, then, is not in the court of the ‘marginalised’ media • Analysing the mind of the but in the hands of us, readers and subscribers, who seek Sakuntala ‘masculine’ Indian male / information, unbiased news and the truth about the goings- Narasimhan Aditi Bishnoi on in the corridors of power, she points out • Making schooling meaningful for girls / Pamela Philipose ver 380 officers of the Indian Telecom Engineering Service in the • We need a credible news Department of Telecoms, at the level of general manager, are being channel / Nava Thakuria paid over one lakh rupees each as monthly salary, without any “O • work. They are surplus to the DOT’s companies, BSNL/ MTNL, and are all Well-told stories with asked to sit at home. This adds up to an annualwaste of over Rs 40 crores – substance always score / and this, while both BSNL and MTNL are running up losses of over Rs 10,000 Sunaina Batra and Sarita crores per year.” These details never appeared in any newspaper. They are Anand from a small monthly bulletin called ICTs and Society (Journal of the Centre for • Of stalwarts and decades Telecom Management and Studies) published from Hyderabad by a retired, past / R.V. Rajan former high-ranking official of the department who focuses relentlessly on • Assamese Cinema : Ably what is wrong, not only with the working of our telecom services but in other surviving against the odds / sectors of society . Bharati Bharali Like the following details that we as taxpayers should be aware about – • in 2004, Andhra Pradesh had just around 200 engineering colleges with an A tribute to a poet and a footballer / Shoma A. intake of under 70000 students. During 2008 alone, the then chief minister, Chatterji Rajashekhara Reddy, sanctioned 270 additional engineering colleges. Does it matter? It does, for the consequences it has on quality – since there were not • History of Konkani sufficient applicants, the qualifying marks were set at 25 per cent. The long- Journalism / Mrinal term repercussions, in terms of quality of professional work and standards, can Chatterjee be imagined, especially in engineering (can we predict news reports, a decade • Remembering from now, about substandard bridges that collapsed, killing people?). B.G. Verghese/ Raghavendra Rao/ Robin Williams (Continued on page 3) January-March 2015 VIDURA 1 FROM THE EDITOR A need, perhaps, for considerable restraint and dignity It was horrendous. The headquarters, also in Paris. Threats writing by these words: simplicity, attack against French satirical notwithstanding, editors of the clarity, brevity and dignity. My publication Charlie Hebdo that has magazine have remained defiant in lecturer’s words found echo in left many dead, in France and continuing its critical satirical line. what Pope Francis said a few elsewhere. The killing of innocent days ago while on his way from schoolchildren in Peshawar was In some ways, the Charlie Sri Lanka to the Philippines. He barbaric and the world was yet to Hebdo incident in Paris and that said there were limits to freedom come to terms with that episode which played out in Tiruchendur of expression and that following when the chilling attack took in Tamil Nadu about a week the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris place in the heart of Paris, in later have similar echoes – it “one cannot make fun of faith”. He the heart of the free world. If the is freedom of expression that’s added that freedom of speech was bloody massacre in Peshawar was facing the guillotine. Tamil writer a fundamental human right but randomly executed out, the one Perumal Murugan, the author of “every religion has its dignity”, in France’s capital was methodi- Madhorubhagan, after receiving and “man had slapped nature in the cally carried out. The two heavily threats and under duress, decided face”. It’s the discretion we use – to armed men apparently called to issue a statement offering an write, to publish. For example, Sky out the names of the journalists “unconditional” apology for having News took an editorial decision not to make sure they were the ones hurt the sentiments of a certain to feature the cover of the ‘survivors’ they wanted before shooting section of people and withdrawing Charlie Hebdo issue. So did the Daily them. Millions walked through the all his books, asking publishers not Mail, The Telegraph, Sun, Mirror, streets of Paris a few days after the to sell copies anymore. The writer ITN and Press Gazette. However, incident, in a show of unity against in him was dead, he proclaimed. the Guardian (online only), Times, the attack. It was not just freedom of Murugan’s book, incidentally, was Financial Times, the Independent and expression that had been violated; published in 2010 and all was quiet BBC decided otherwise. Websites it was an attempt to instill fear, to since. Resentment against written Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and destroy the human spirit. Despite material has surfaced in the past, Yahoo News published the Charlie the courageous show of strength, too. For example, Ulysses (by James Hebdo front page. Has Charlie and Charlie Hebdo coming up with Joyce) was declared by government Hebdo been crossing limits over the a special ‘survivors’ issue’ that flew officials in the UK in the 1920s to years? The question can be debated off the shelves and sold millions of be “unreadable, unquotable and endlessly and there will be no copies, journalism may never be the unreviewable”, according to The clear-cut answer. But what appears same again, at least for a long while. Economist. Thanks mainly to the clearer at the end of all this is that Indeed, as a statement issued by final chapter in the book which journalists will have to exercise WAN-IFRA says, “It is not just an none other than D.H. Lawrence felt restraint and bring some amount of attack against the press, but also an was “the dirtiest, most indecent, dignity to their work, else they will attack on the fabric of our society and obscene thing ever written”. Copies have to be prepared to fight their the values for which we all stand. of the book were burnt on both own battles. Even as other battles This should be a wake up call for all sides of the Atlantic. Now, of course, are likely to be played out in the of us to counter the rising climate Ulysses is considered one of the best public space. of hatred that threatens to fracture of modernist fiction of the 20th our understanding of democracy.” Century. Sashi Nair It must be noted, however, that the [email protected] incident was not the first on Charlie When I was a student of Journa- Hebdo. In 2011, an arson attack had lism more than two decades ago, one destroyed the publication’s then of the lecturers encapsulated good 2 VIDURA January-March 2015 (Continued from page 1) The March-April 2013 issue of the ICT journal (edited by its founder, T.H. Chaudary) also carried further details about how brokers buy students for engineering colleges to fill up quotas, how the government is reimbursing fees for 80 per cent of the students ‘certified’ as “poor and backward”, and how the library is not used because many of the new colleges are situated far from the urban areas, in outlying rural Photos: Internet hinterland (where land is cheap Citizen Matters, which was launched in 2008 by the Oorvani Foundation has and there is no hostel facility. This won several prestigious journalism awards, including the Manthan Award in is a devastating indictment of 2014. the education scene, especially in technical education, but it took cannot even be bought on the news media are characterised by a tightly a media outlet “on the margins” stands, so their visibility is low knit two-way relationship between (without mainstream subscriber which makes for a vicious circle. the producers and readers – most base) to expose these malpractices. There are plenty of examples, of readers buy them because they want Almost all of us depend on media on the margins, kept alive by to know what others’ viewpoints newspapers, magazines, television dedicated individuals, but I shall are, while mainstream publications and, sometimes, the Internet, for restrict myself to just two examples dish out what they think the public news about what is happening – the Bengaluru-based Citizen wants to read and will pay for. In around us. But does all that is Matters (from Oorvani Foundation) a milieu where profits become happening and should be of interest and the Delhi-based Down to Earth the dominant yardstick, these to the taxpaying public get reported published by the Centre for Science ‘other’ media publications on the in these media? It is the answer and Environment. There are some margins become, in fact, even more to this question that validates the like the Economic and Political important. existence – and proliferation – of Weekly (from Mumbai) that do not Citizen Matters, which was a number of ‘off stream’ media/ exactly count as mainstream, nor launched in 2008 by the Oorvani publications that offer information are they like the bulletins of the Foundation (Meera K.