Effects of TV on Indians - Essay, UPSC MAINS | Course for UPPSC Preparation - UPPSC (UP) PDF Download

Effects of TV on Indians

Television came to Indian shortly after the first decade of independence, and has gone on the become a national obsession. In its golden jubilee year the Indan State struggles to contain the beast, to harness it through law. but that is lke attempting to capture a genie after it is out of the bottle. A genie that has become anb unmanageable force.

When India became free television was something that Indians only encountered when they went abroad. Film was the visual medium through which a young nation's psyche found expression. half a century later films remain a powerful emotional vehicle for a country wracked by divisivencess bordering on secession. struggling to keep communalism at bay. and watching corruption. brutality and institutional decay gnaw at its vitals. Television extends films into the India home. In doing so it has wrought a series of changes in the way people conduct theirlives and leisure, in the way they rear their children, and in the way a whole generation of young Indians have begun to view reality. Children now eat their meals and do their homework in front of the TV set, parents buy these to keep their adolescent daughters indoors so that they are not “spoilt” before mar riage.

But TV has also created its own programming w3ith its own consequences. Films are less likely to beguile viewers into thinking that life is like this. TV has over the last ten years or more evolved through its serials a homogenised Indian identity that is Hindi-speaking, urban and midedle class, with a section of it extending one caustious foot beyond the Lakshman Rekha of convention. Those outside this stereotyping are fringe elements in Indian society. usually depicted on television as caricatures.

The medium has also purveyed a sea-change in the depiction of Indian women. And in audience responses to these depictions. In 1984, Bhagwanti in “Hum Log”, a long-suffering wife, was devised by the script writers as a negative role model, but was received by television audiences as a positive one. By 1992 Manorama, a similar character in “Humraahi”, was intended as a positive role model but received negatively by audiences who thought she was too much of a doormat. By 1999 unconventional Indian women, undeterred by scruples in their quest to fulfil their ambitions, were becoming the norm in daily sops, whether on privately owned satellite channels or on Doordarshan.

This medium has also permeated Indian society so irrevocably that poor urban children in India's increasingly unliveable citiees conssider it a basic need. They can forego food, they cannot forego television. Their mothers and fathers scrimp and save to buy TV sets on instalments so that they will not have to feel inferior to other children.

Consumerism came to India via print advertising, but increasingly became synonymous with television commercials. It brought brand awareness to rural markets, amall sachets of shamshampoo and detergent to rural ahops, as well as toilet soaps believed to be used by film stars. In the mid-Eighties a small shopowner in Ahmedabad would report that he stocked his shop according to the products shown most frequently on television. In the mid-Nineties another shopowner, a young woman in faraway Azawl would say exactly the same thing. TV promotes consumerism  in a way cinema never can. It can sell not just a product but a concept, not just pepsi but cool theirst, felt by cool people.

And what of the not-so-cool people, the ones who felt real thirsst for water? They in fact, were Indian television's original constituency, the vast segment of population whose lives are changing through television. a segment beyond the pale of television set ownership. They were to be targeted through direct broadcasts from satellites, to community sets given by the government. And so they have been off and on over the years, starting in 1959, continuing through the Sixties in msmall localised pockets,and then in a big way through the Stellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in he midSeventies. After SITe came the Kheda Communications Project in Gujarat, and ETV or educational television, a follow-up to SITE which targeted rural schools in the selected districts and today reaches 10 states.

As rural penetration of television grew in the late-Eighties and int he Nineties Doordarshan's occasional prime time experiments in development communication. as well as its farm telecasts from its regional kendras found occasional viewership. So did a soap opera telecast in the afternaoons which was designed to promote literacy. and had a rural setting. From the mid-Eighties development spots on television seeking to promote maternal health, the status of the girl child, family planning, basic hygiene, and later national integration and secularism, grew.

The intended audiences of all these efforts over three-and-a-half decades did not remain untouched. But nor were their lives radically transformed, for the same reason that successive anti-poverty programmes have not banished poverty from this country. Government delivers in its own indifferent fashion. Immunisation was promoted on television. but was not necessarily available at the nearest health centre. Family planning was promoted. but all the contraceptive methods described were not necessarily on offer at the local centres.

And yet over the years there has been change, even in the Bemaiu states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Awareness of the need for family planning has risen, so has adoption of spacing and contraception methods. Awareness of the minimum age of marriage for girls has also increased. The cumulative impact of the kheda experiment, for instance, was that those exposed to its telecasts were more likely  to educate their daughters, less likely to demand dowry, and less likely to practice caste discrimination.

Basic health and hygiene messages have been received and acted upon in both urban and rural areas. Men and women say as much when interviewed. What used to be taught to children in schools in now aught to adults by television. Boil your drinking water, wash your hands with soa0p after you've been to the bathroom.

Above all it has become the primary source of news in the country., The poor cannot afford newspapers, but having invested in TV sets, tap it eagerly every day for news. The medium increases awarencess of national and international politics and influences the vote. Studies have found that Indians are long-suffering bout not gullible. Successive efforts from the mid-Seventies onwards in using television as a tool of political propaganda have failed. Such efforts have been made by Indara Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi and most recently by P.V. Narasimha Rao and Jayalalitha.

But television has emerged as a tremendous negative force in electoral politics. A Jayalalitha bites the dust at least partly because television does not let voters forget her misdemeanours while in office. A political rival's channel runs a relentless campaign against her rule. Voters have vivid recall of the wedding she organised for her foster son, copiously shown on television. and they cannot forgive her the ostentation. They are also put off by her misuse of her own television channel. Similarly, the Congress Party is routed in 1996, despite strenous misuse of television for more than six months preceding the polls. Surveyed before the polling some voters repeatedly mention the television images of minister afterminister being implicated in the Hawala scams and produced in the courts. And who can forget the  onion episode in TV.

So does all this mean an increasingly rational and mature society preparing to enter the next century? For an answer to that one, tune in on Sundays, as well as early morning weekdays. In its fourth decade of television the fare India watches in more replete with gods than ever before.

In the mid-eighities when “Ramayana” first surfaced on the Indian TV screen it actually contributed substantially to the growth of television ownership, as people bought sets so that they could watch it. It moved men and women no end, and produced in them a hankering for Ramrajya, or a mythical golden age. Today with the novelty worn off, people still watch endless mythologicals on a number of TV chan nels. Because, at the end of the century, morality is passe, but religion, like fast food, is an increasingly popular form of gratification.