All is not well in Information and Broadcasting Ministry

Radio and TV have never made a mark for the quality of their sound and images. But the discordant noises currently cruising the air waves, emanating from clashes of personality and politics, have made even the apologists of government controlled media sit up and take note. A chain of potentially far-reaching events in recent weeks indicate that all is not well in the kingdom of Information and Broadcasting Minister Vasant Sathe.

• Last fortnight, a 20-year-old arrangement came to an abrupt end when AIR's news services division stopped supplying news copy to Doordarshan. Said Kamaleshwar, who joined as Doordarshan's Additional Director General - a new post - three months ago: "It is TV which stopped taking the news. It is high time we started preparing our own news bulletin in keeping with the needs of the medium." In fact, Doordarshan had upped its news service demands because Kamaleshwar felt that the material being sent in wasn't adequate for a visual medium. As the demands rose, so did resentment in the news division, and finally, on March 16, the newsroom cut off the supply of news copy.
• If that was dramatic, it paled before the game of musical chairs that has been played out at the top levels of some radio and TV centres of the country. On the plea that the Government's image needed to be better projected, a number of top level shifts have been ordered. Most recently, the director of Delhi TV, S.P.N. Kiran. was shunted off to head radio in Patna. His predecessor, Shiv Sharma, was last year moved to radio and now to Calcutta TV from where Meera Majumdar has been brought to Delhi radio. AIR's Jullundur director, A.R. Tatari, was recently given marching orders for Lucknow and the Lucknow man Bashir Batt transferred to Jullundur. "Give a man three years to prove his worth," asserts Kamaleshwar, "but if that doesn't happen, why grudge a transfer?"
• At still more exalted levels the clouds of controversy have gotten murkier. The top brass of the Government's news and information services are at loggerheads with one another. Principal Information Officer Wilfred Lazarus recently clashed with his own deputy, U.C. Tewari, who also happens to be the prime minister's Additional Information Adviser. The issue was the prized responsibility for handling Mrs Gandhi's publicity. Tewari won. Then, AIR's Director of News Services, Pratap Kapoor, was also irked with Tewari, who began to take an extraordinary interest in the functioning of the newsroom. Tewari once escorted Sathe's Deputy Minister Kumud Ben Joshi on an inspection tour without Kapoor's consent. And there has been a running controversy about the coverage of Mrs Gandhi's early morning meetings with the public and politicians. The dispute was eventually resolved only with the intervention of higher-ups who made it unmistakably clear that the responsibility for projecting the prime minister's image rests with Tewari.