50TH BIRTHDAY OF TELEVISION IN INDIA

It was 15th September, 1959, when India’s first television channel, “Doordarshan” was born. Let us go back in history and remember those days of “Hum Log”, “Buniyad”, “Chitrahaar”and everyone’s favourate, “Ramayan”.

In 1959, using some equipment donated to All India Radio (AIR) by Philips after an exhibition, a television channel was started in Delhi. It broadcast programmes for an hour twice a week. It was an experimental telecast, with a small transmitter and a makeshift studio. Its programmes could be seen mostly by the great and the powerful, the people who were provided the only television sets, bulky black-and-white, then available in India.


In the first years after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru and his government decided as a matter of policy that they would concentrate on improving radio coverage and that television was a luxury the country could not afford at that time. So, television remained as “experimental” broadcast.

Perceptions changed when Indira Gandhi became Minister of Information & Broadcasting. She believed that television was a vitally important means of communication and pushed for its establishment on a regular footing. A regular daily transmission started in Delhi in 1965 and in 1972, a television station came up in Bombay (now Mumbai), the second in the country, followed by stations in Jalandhar and Srinagar. Thereafter, in quick succession, stations opened in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Madras (now Chennai) and a few other cities.

All of these were operated by AIR, which had a special division called AIR-TV. But in 1976, television was separated from Radio and renamed as Doordarshan, a Public Servicing Broadcasting channel.

The nature of the programmes broadcast by these stations varied, but some of them were outstanding, made by people such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Vijay Tendulkar and others. The finest creative minds in cinema saw this new medium as something exciting and made memorable programmes, which attracted a large number of viewers. With the starting of these stations, television sets began to appear in the market and were bought by those eager to see what the new medium had to provide.
For a long time, television remained an urban medium. In 1982, came the second decisive moment in the 50 years of Indian television: the use of satellites and the switch-over to colour. This was ostensibly because of the Asian Games, but it altered the nature of television radically.

Soo it was now possible to broadcast programmes to the entire country through one station only and that station, it was decided, would be Delhi, and the programme, would be called the National Programme.

The third decisive moment was in 1990, when CNN positioned a satellite close to India and telecast the Gulf War live. Suddenly, audiences realised they could see a channel other than Doordarshan, a realisation not lost on private entrepreneurs. They used Hong Kong as a base to start private television channels and beamed programmes airlifted from India to satellites positioned close to India. Private satellite television had arrived in India.

More and more private channels came up, more and more glitzy programmes fascinated audiences, and Doordarshan lost the earlier limelight it was getting alone.
The private channels might have dominated Doordarshan, but it still remained the only channel, that is reaching 90% of the Indian population and has left a lot of wonderful memories for those who have traced it since its inception. However, in this commercialized world, it’s a great challenge for Doordarshan to make a space for its survival.