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Editorial
Alive,
not kicking
Lou
Bega, the mambo-jambo spouting star was a crashing bore, at least on the
Mumbai leg of his India jamboree. Almost befittingly, the crowd turn-out
was next to negligible. But make no mistake, live entertainment is catching
on in India.
It was worth all but Rs 210 crore in 1999. Small change, really, considering
these are the national figures. Halfway into 2000, nothing much has changed
for the still-nascent industry. Chances are, there will be but a marginal
increase in turnover, if at all, this year. Judging from the schedule
of stage events for the year, our guess is, it should gross hardly more
than Rs 250 crore by end-December.
On the face of it, live entertainment does seem alive and well in the
country. Thanks to the globalisation, the number of international performers
visiting India to promote their albums has increased exponentially. What’s
more India’s corporate biggies have also begun to evince a hearty
appetite for staged entertainment, particularly when such events are organised
as part of exercises in product promotion.
No, we haven’t quite reached the stage of the big churn, yet. What
we’re seeing is but a small stir, really. After all, what’s
Rs 250 crore in a nation as huge as ours? And, excluding Mumbai and some
of the other metros, there’s very little big time event management
happening in other centres. It’s not as if we haven’t woken
up to the potential, yet, the problems lie elsewhere -- particularly in
the odds stacked against live events of any sort.
VERITABLE HURDLE RACE
If you think event management is a novel, exciting way to package entertainment,
consider the odds:
Event management at best, is essentially a race against time, a veritable
hurdle race. In the absence of a single window system, organisers have
to run from pillar to post to even get the necessary sanctions for holding
the event. The union government, the concerned municipal corporations,
the police and the customs have all to be met, and the palms of the top
brass sufficiently greased, before sanctions will be forthcoming. The
need of the hour, then, is a rationalisation of these requirements, under
a single counter.
Then, of course, there are the plethora of back-breaking taxes. Believe
it or not, the ministry of finance in the central government stipulates
that as much as 85 per cent of the net income earned by an event management
outfit has to be donated to charity. Tell us, what is it, but a draconian
tax policy, that would have been so ridiculous if it weren’t so tragic?
Well, there’s more coming. There are claimants for a bite into the
remaining 15 per cent, too. The state governments chip in with entertainment
tax -- these vary from state to state, and are in urgent need of being
rationalised. And then, there are the service charges for the event managers.
All these can be killing for any enterprise. If live entertainment isn’t
an industry that’s growing at the rate it should, or organisers keep
coming up with devious ways to evade taxes, now you know whom to blame.
Sharing the spoils
It's never the organisers or the event managers alone, who profit from
staged entertainment. Travel and hotel bills, for instance, account for
a major pie of the spoils, which only proves that live shows are a big
boost to other industries, too. Dealers of sound and lighting equipment,
artistes, music troupes and dancers are among others who get to peddle
their wares and strut their stuff at these events.
By reducing the burden of taxation and introducing the single window system
for approvals, the governments only stand to gain more -- for by doing
so, they will encourage more enterprise. Despite the back-breaking tax
regime, the industry is already growing at an annual rate of 60 per cent.
With a more favourable tax structure, there are bound to be fewer cases
of evasion, more accountability and consequently, increased revenues for
the government. What’s more it even stands to gain some valuable
foreign exchange from Indian artistes who perform at stage shows abroad.
It’s time the government realised other industries need to be encouraged
just as much as information technology. It bends over backwards to kowtow
to the whizkids of IT, but subjects entrepreneurs in other fields to punishing
tax regimes and bureaucratic bullying.
Can
a nation survive on IT alone?
Shaju George Alex