MARCH 5: These are taxing times. Television channels must learn to economise, boost productivity and increase our rate of interest by lowering their time-spend on deficit programming. That or they will be MODvatted (!?!). That or their viewership will plummet like the Sensex did on 29 February.Bullish or bearish, these remarks arise from nine hours of (on and off) budgeting on television, the day Yashwant Sinha didn't ``bite the bullet''.The Budget telecasts went from 2pm-11 pm. So it was surprising to discover notable omissions. Unsighted: politicians. Arun Jaitely, Sitaram Yechuri, Jairam Ramesh, Manohar Joshi, Manmohan Singh, P.Chidambaram and Madhavrao Scindia, briefly. Mostly on DD. Where was the rest of Opp. or the NDA Allies? Zee News and Star New had `the people' react to whatever it was of the budget they fathomed. But Doordarshan didn't bother with them. Who are they any way? Another absence: any serious or lengthy discussion on health, education, drinking water, etc. Partly, this poverty of interest, may be attributed to Sinha's budget speech which dwelt on them like a mosquito on a flit gun. But we are being constantly told by the experts that upon these issues depends the status of our economy. So, why no discussion?Innovations: Star News dared to venture out of the studio to CII's headquarters where top-notch business and economic gurus sat around roundish tables like they do at luncheons and dinners and fed off budget morsels.The anchors: first among equals was Onkar Goswami (DD) who never appeared to get up even for you-know-what. He was hard-hitting, nevertheless. Vivek Bharti did a Goswami on Zee and often in Hindi. Tough, very tough. STAR News stuck to its trusted team of Prannoy Roy and T.N.Ninan, with Shireen and Vikram Chandra filling in (English and Hindi) while the two travelled from CII HQ to the hotel where Sinha was entertaining TV anchors or journalists and from there back to the studio. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Raghav Behl led the CNBC team. Strictly for the nitty-gritty types.Rajat Sharma on DD and Vinod Dua on Zee looked most out of sync. They were not precisely passengers but they were backseat drivers. Their only advantage was they sorta spoke the language we do and not the gibberish, sorry, secret code of the initiated. Ignorance is bliss.DD was all things to all comers; CNBC was talking to the business community, national and international. STAR was speaking to PWM (People Who Matter), Zee was addressing itself, primarily, to HSPWM (Hindi-Speaking People Who Matter). A problem: what was obscure in English became incomprehensible in Hindi. No wonder everyone shied away from it previously.Suggestion: instead of running ticker-tapes on the stock exchange, may be the channels should have run highlights of the budget which concern us all in simple English: cigarette prices up, taxation up, computers down, whatever.It seems long, live telecasts have become a (bad?) habit. Political contests (elections) and beauty contests (Miss India) vie with sports contests (cricket); airline hijacks (IA 814) follow roadshows (Vajpayee's Lahore bus ride) which pursue award ceremonies (Oscars, Grammys); celebrities `live' on days after their deaths (Princess Diana) and the Union budget takes nine hours.. Imagine Clinton's visit.But there is only so much real time one can devote to a single broadcast. Maybe that's why cricket test matches no longer top TV ratings. An even more ingenious explanation is that, nowadays, tests often finish within three days because five are two days too many for television.Besides the budget: the recent assembly elections consumed almost all the waking hours of one day; the 1999 general elections were on air for 2-4 days; the airwaves were pretty much hijacked throughout the 8-day Kandahar drama.In a manner of speaking, the attempt is to fill time with space. To fill in the long hours, space is provided to all manner of people for `expert' comments on subjects they're not always qualified to comment upon. In the process everyone has become a psephlogist, a political analyst, an economic commentator, a hijack expert. We are in an era of revolving-door television in which you circulate as many opinions as possible in the time you have. So, during the Budget the mantra was to get diversity: CII, Assocham, Rahul Bajaj, Tarun Das, the RBI Dy Chairman, former Finance Ministers, N.K Singh, we meet every Budget, but there were many, many others : Butani, Damani, Jagannathan, Bhargava, Vinayak Chatterjee, Amit Tandon, Ekadambari, Value Research, Sharad Joshi, Birla Sunlight Life, Sharad Desai from Honkong, a former Chief Secretary of Assam from Guwahati, Lord Desai, from London, Guru Deshpande from Sycamaore Networks, Bharti Telecom, Ranbaxy, Satyam, Bell Control's Sudhir Jain, Ford India's PhilSpender.So many viewpoints. Unless you already understand what is going on, it's not easy to understand what is going on. And you have to stay with the telecasts to do that which get more and more involved as they go on.At the end of each live show, you're full of details. A bit like eating cocktail snacks for meals. Viewership ratings maybe high but the quality has depreciated. These lengthy, live telecasts are driven by competition between channels rather than necessity. Does the budget really require 7 hours non-stop discussion on DD1, Star News or Zee News? Or, to put it differently, are we as viewers such sluggish dullards we require 72 hours to achieve a functional knowledge of the general election results?Please: give us the news throughout the day and a hotly-debated prime time discussion that lasts between 2-3 hours. Only.
