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DD caught napping on Millennium plans

The cricket-loving Minister for Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley wants Doordarshan to make a big splash for the millennium. What better way than to telecast live a cricket match played for DD on the midnight of December 31.

Unfortunately for him, the Indian team will then be playing in Australia. Also, DD has been planning its way of celebrating the millennium for over two years, and is yet to come up with a concrete proposal. Now, with the clock ticking away, it may just be forced to accept a 24-hour, 56-nation package BBC is parting with for $ 15,000 plus the production cost of three programmes specifically shot for it from India.

The saga of how DD is yet to finalise its plans for the century, even as international networks are promoting their events, is mirrored by its fractured administrative history: three chief executive officers (CEOs) and as many ministers in two years.

Ousted CEO Surrindar Singh Gill set the ball rolling in early 1998 when he asked Prasar Bharati member U R Rao to author a note on science and technology, recently-retired Delhi School of Economics sociologist Andre Beteille to do the same on social change and economist Deepak Nayyar on the state of the nation’s bottomline — the first two actually produced notes which Gill was going to use to assign a 40-part series on Millennium Change and India to various filmmakers.

But Gill left in August last year and that was enough for the proposal to be put on the backburner. In came O P Kejariwal who promptly assigned the task to Sudhir Tandon, a controller of production (CP) in Doordarshan. A proposal from the American Millennium Television Network for a 24-hour, 12-nation package on December 31 was rejected for being too expensive — in the vicinity of $ 2 million.

Out went Kejariwal. In came Rajeeva Ratna Shah. Now there’s a committee comprising Tandon and two other CPs, Ananya Banerjee and Usha Bhasin, which has been in place since April and is expected to have weekly brainstorming sessions, which it doesn’t. A budget of Rs 1.5 crore has been set aside for commissioned programmes — 100 proposals have come in and about 20 will be short-listed. By January 1, 2000, DD hopes these programmes will have gone on air and the new look that the Minister is expecting will be in place.