Editorial

The ever-multiplying multiplex woes

Bravo, Alka! India gets its multiplex number three with Jaipur’s Alka rolling out the red carpet for patrons, this week. Not that we’ve done much to deserve multiplexes. For Alka, mind you, has come up despite the system not because of it.

Come to think of it, it’s a marvel how multiplexes ever get commissioned in the country at all. Ask any exhibitor worth his salt, and he’ll tell you multiplexes present a multiplicity of woes to circumvent. Seeing the project through from conception to completion is as much a test of one’s endurance and dogged persistence as of one’s bank balance. So Alka’s done well to get thus far. Like it says in the denim ad, it’s the "Arrival of the Fittest."

Jaipur may have ushered in the Single Window system with much fanfare, solely to deal with cinema projects. The media, including SCREEN had hailed it as an example that other states ought to follow. The Single Window, it turned out, was but a pre-election gimmick, an elaborate hoax.

Sample this: Rahmat Khan, the proprietor of the new Pink City cineplex, was made to go through a harrowing ordeal to get the NOC for the project. To obtain permission for the multiplex, he had to approach as many as five government departments -- the police, the PWD, the town planner, the additional district collector and the Jaipur Development Authority. And that’s not all, he had to cough up Rs 3,19,000 as building permission fee and Rs 1.5 lakh as "development" charges to the JDA (though no development work was ever done on the site by the JDA), Rs 15,705 as scrutiny fee, Rs 10,500 as earnest money and the like. To top it all, Khan has been granted use of the land on lease for a period of 20 years on an annual rent of Rs 28,000 -- this despite the fact that the land happens to be his own!

Frankly, with the odds stacked so heavily against entrepreneurs, we’re surprised any one ever wanted to build a multiplex in the state at all, the tax holiday notwithstanding.

A nationwide phenomenon
Not that the grass is any greener in other states. Exhibitors have to work their way round the same set of bottlenecks and a similar bureacratic maze elsewhere, too. Maharashtra alone has 14 proposals pending sanction, projects that have been hanging fire for quite a while now. And though the ministry for cultural affairs keeps paying lip service to the need for more multiplexes, prospective entrepreneurs are made to run from pillar to post for for the sanctions. Agreed, two multiplexes are to be inaugurated in Mumbai, next week, but even these, like Alka, have come up despite the formidable odds.

Pending before the centre are proposals by several Hollywood majors including Columbia Tristar and Twentieth Century Fox to construct multiplexes in the country. Why on earth these projects have been relegated to the backburner, despite the paucity of cinema, defies logic.
Last week saw the producers and exhibitors back at their old game of trading accusations. The producers attribute the poor showing of most recent releases to the "obscene" ticket rates, while the exhibitors say the audience has shied away from theatres on account of the crass movies. Both have a point. And each had better pay heed to what the other is saying.

But rationalising admission rates at theatres isn’t going to be easy unless we have more theatres. At the heart of almost all our cinematic woes is the utter paucity of theatres -- merely a 1000-odd cinemas cater to a population of 92 crore . The result? Several good films are languishing in the cans for want of theatre outlets, while the distributors and exhibitors keep clamouring for the "big", but not necessarily good ones.

Multiplexes are just what the doctor ordered. Not only for the film industry but also for the moviebuff and the government. Which is why the step-motherly treatment meted out to cineplexes defeats all reason. What on earth do the state governments have to lose by giving them the go-ahead? Or by introducing the single window system for project clearances? Answers, anyone?

Shaju George Alex