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MEDIA AIR's New Aria 20,000 employees, revenues of just Rs 74 crore and falling, and nimble new competition. Can AIR beat the odds and reinvent itself? By Shailesh Dobhal
Sometime in the middle of september, 29 junior level executives, their ties in place and shoes polished, showed up at the National Institute of Entrepreneurial Development in NOIDA for a 15-day workshop on selling. Nothing unusual about the manager wannabes, except their sponsor, All India Radio (AIR). As radio broadcasting enters its 75th year in India, the staid, quasi-government public service broadcaster (PSB)-until 1999, the only one-is waking up to competition from a new crop of private players, most of whom are big media entities themselves. Before the 2001 calendar ends, 39 private fm radio stations would have sprung up across 19 cities in India. In fact, one of the big players, Star TV's Radio City, is already off the block in Bangalore. For the 65-year-old broadcaster, none of whose nine mandated objectives says anything like ''make money'', reinventing itself into a commercial player is proving to be anything but easy. Indeed, it is no coincidence that AIR does not have a marketing department. But, as Anil Baijal, CEO of Prasar Bharti, which manages both AIR and Doordarshan, says, ''It is the aggressive body language of these young staffers that gives me hope.''
Baijal will need truck-loads of hope, enthusiasm and luck as he sets about ensuring that the 20,000-plus employee AIR is not tuned-out either from its public service broadcasting role or from the impending fight for commercial revenues with private fm players. What makes the going difficult for Baijal is the fact that he is fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Unlike its private competitors, AIR must depend on government grants to fund its operations. Besides, both listener base and revenues are shrinking. Listenership of radio (among adults, all India) was down 5 per cent to about 28 per cent in 2001-02. Revenues, never anything to make a song and dance about, have dropped from Rs 81.4 crore in 1995-96 to Rs 74 crore last year-a sliver of the Rs 8,000 crore spent last year by way of advertisements. And that for a broadcaster that reaches 98.8 per cent of the country's population and boasts over 11.5 crore radio sets, nearly half of which have the fm facility. ''AIR has not been seriously into commercial broadcast, only PSB,'' points out Baijal. AIR runs 329 channels (these include, besides the primary channels and external service channels, nine metro FMs, 121 non-metro FMs, 39 Vividh Bharatis, and four FM2s), as part of its mandate of presenting information of ''national, regional, local, and international interest'', including agriculture, health and family welfare, education, and science and technology. But in trying to be everything to everybody, AIR has become a corpulent broadcaster. The metropolises and big cities have a mindless duplication of primary AIR channels. Delhi, for instance, has five non-fm channels; Mumbai, seven. Most of the other stations are merely a drain on its resources. Baijal is now looking at eliminating redundancy, although he hasn't as yet come up with an optimal number. Lost In Space On the software front, Baijal is planning to merge the news operations of AIR and Doordarshan; their news teams will be co-located by the middle of November, and the new entity will very soon also have its own separate budget and an administrative machinery. But just how is this restructuring going to help AIR? ''Retraining our correspondents in bi-modal broadcast, a la BBC Radio and Television, will be vital to AIR becoming a vibrant broadcaster,'' says Harish Awasthi, Director General (News), Prasar Bharati. He also sees AIR selling its content creation skills to other players, although by doing so he runs the risk of undermining the broadcaster's edge. Merging news operations will work more to the benefit of DD, which has just 10 correspondents all over the country, and can now tap AIR 300-odd correspondent network. The reasoning at Prasar Bharti is that, eventually, the same satellite transponder will be used for both DD News and Radio fm signals, and to network fm stations in 40 cities. AIR is also exploring the possibility of leasing out under-utilised studios and transmitters to those government organisations that can further its own mandate of public service. It has already signed an MoU with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for airtime and content creation for the university's radio-led distance learning initiative. Baijal has initiated similar talks with several state governments too. Apart from growing listenership, such initiatives are expected to fetch AIR Rs 40-50 crore in revenue each year over the next three. But not everybody thinks that things are alright. Says N. Bhaskara Rao, Chairman, Centre for Media Studies: ''AIR is falling to pieces, but it refuses to learn from its own mistakes or the experience of others.'' 1 | 2 |
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