BBC Hindi: Someone still loves you!

Thankfully, The BBC Hindi radio service has won a temporary reprieve after a lakhs of people wrote in to offer support and to appeal to the BBC to keep the service on air. The campaign was supported by writers such as Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and broadcaster Sir Mark Tully.

A listener from Bihar actually said, ‘I have five cows. I will gladly sell one of them and send the money to the BBC so that it continues its MW service.’ However, the BBC charter prohibits the service from accepting donations.

The BBC World Service says it has been approached by a number of commercial parties about alternative funding.

It has now agreed to keep a one hour evening broadcast in Hindi for another year while it explores these options.

That’s a bit sad, because evening broadcasts tend to be overshadowed by television. Lots of people usually listen to the early morning BBC half hour broadcast at 6:30 am

Campaigners said BBC Hindi broadcasts, which were scheduled to end on 31 March, have 10 million listeners, many of them in rural areas.

Launched in May 1940 in the midst of World War II and the freedom struggle, the BBC Hindi service was religiously followed by generations of listeners, who considered it the most credible source of news. Listeners still remember that the BBC Hindi was the first to announce Indira Gandhi's assassination to both India and the world, even before the government broadcasters made the announcement. Reports suggest that even Maoists in the isolated jungles of eastern India tune in for the BBC Hindi.

However, from an estimated listener base of 30 million a decade ago, the BBC Hindi has seen its audience decline to just over nine million today, hit by the poor reception of short and medium wave radio and the rising popularity of television and FM.

“We are considering the option of some radio programming on the website as well,” said BBC Hindi Editor Amit Baruah. Of course, we can listen to BBC over the internet, but how many people actually have internet connections at home. How many students and young people can afford this? BBC on internet is little consolation for the vast majority of rural listeners who are the real audience and the biggest fans of the BBC.

The BBC would jump at the chance to set up an FM channel of its own, to continue providing radio services in the same way as it is doing in several other countries where short and medium wave services are being cut.

India is the only South Asian nation that does not allow private FM news channels. In fact, the BBC launched its preliminary FM initiative, providing entertainment and non-news content to partner channels reaching 52 cities, in the hope that the government would soon agree to allow news content as well.



BBC Hindi has been beaming to India for 70 years



While the BBC continues to provide short-wave services in India in Tamil, Urdu, Bengali and Nepali, sources suggest that all short wave services will ultimately be shut down. Unless they are allowed to broadcast news on FM, The BBC radio's era in India may soon be over.

Can you imagine how self-centred the local print media are?



BBC Hindi, which has a huge following in rural Bihar, was slated to shut down by March 31, 2011, but did we see this anywhere as a major news item in our self-important English language newspapers?