India: A suicide that exposes media’s susceptibility

by Nava Thakuria

The news broke from Chennai in south India as a senior photojournalist killed himself on 13 February 2022 in his office itself. Initially it was thought T. Kumar’s suicide as a personal affair, but soon the reality surfaced.

The victim did not receive full salaries for nearly five years (mind it, not months) and he was in desperate need of money. His wife (Kavitha) underwent medical treatments and only daughter Pavithra’s engagement ceremony was also approaching. Kumar (56) might have exhausted the borrowing space from family members and well-wishers! Hence, it was his last unwanted action.

After the incident, I could realise Kumar was known to me as he used to work in Guwahati for some days as a representative of the United News of India (UNI). Kumar had a very amiable nature to accept friends and even help according to his capacity. We had a number of interactions over his medium of expression and the media as a whole.

Kumar was a passionate listener to my ‘lectures unending’ which often crossed the limit. At the end of my discourse, he often concluded the session saying- Nava-da you have to come to my place and I will show you the real Chennai.

Reactions to Kumar’s demise was little slow as everybody understood it as a self-killing issue, but slowly the reality came alive and the media fraternity got a real jerk. A responsible journalist, who was with the UNI for more than three decades, had to end his life as was being denied his dues.

Kumar was not waiting for any lottery or other funds to support his family in distress. He was only expecting his salaries, unpaid for over 50 months, and it was the commitment of UNI management authorities while engaging him in work.

Should not it be treated as a crime against the insensitive UNI management for slowly putting Kumar on the verge of self-destruction?

Lately various media rights bodies have come forward condoling Kumar’s unacceptable death and also raising some finds for the bereaved family. There are over 200 UNI employees across the country, who are also waiting for their dues for years. Need not to deny that the Indian media fraternity has been suffering heavily since the Covid-19 hit the country  two years back.

Newspapers had  lost their circulation drastically, thus their business, influence and visibility too. News channels also start missing authentic audiences and hence their markets. And as a dependent entity on professional media outlets along with some government organs, the news agencies (including UNI) also face a humiliating downfall.

The largest democracy on Earth with a billion-plus population supports over 82,000 registered publications with more than 15,000 in the newspaper category. Published in various languages like English, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, etc the daily newspapers have a cumulative circulation of around 110 million.

But following the corona-crisis, these physical newspapers have lost almost one-third of their actual circulation because of the prolonged nationwide lockdown and various other aftereffects.

India has around 1,600 satellite television channels where more than 400 are news related outlets. As most satellite news channels are free-to-air (FTA) in nature, they heavily depend on commercial advertisements for survival.

These news channels cannot ask money from their viewers (subscribers) and the proprietors have to manage all expenditures from running offices to staff salaries to productions to flawless distributions from their resources. More amazingly, the FTA channel owners have to pay a huge amount of money to cable operators and direct-to-home (DTH) agencies.

However, there is no clarity on how much money a cable operator or a private DTH agency can demand from an Indian FTA channel. The logic behind the financial transactions goes with the arrangement that the cable operator/DTH agency charge the amount for providing space into their packages distributed to the viewers.

On the other hand, they take money from the consumers as monthly freight charges for downloading the signal from the satellite and distributing it to the audience. Nobody knows if at all these financial transactions fall under the financial tax network of the government. With the advent of internet services, which are drastically cheaper in India, millions of digital news platforms are coming up to feed the population where the literacy rate is growing above 75 per cent in
recent times.

One can say, today’s media family has increased its outlets significantly. The digital platforms have  cleverly blended the flavours of newspapers, news channels and also radio outlets, where the audience can get text messages as well as audio-visual inputs. In the long run, taking advantage of the expanded space of smartphones, they may ruin the combined market of traditional media outlets with slowly grabbing  the advertisement revenues, presently meant for mainstream media.

Now the fall of traditional media organs affects the business of news agencies as they are mostly dependent on subscription by the morning dailies and news channels. Initially the Indian news agencies (including UNI) played an important role  as a bridge between the international news carriers and the local media.

But with the change of government policies (as well as invasion of the internet) the agencies start losing their space. The last blow to news agencies came in 2017 as Prasar Bharati decided to withdraw the subscription for its outlets (including All India Radio and Doordarshan). The UNI had to incur instant loss of crores of rupees annually with the Prasar Bharati move.

But for any reason the UNI management can not escape the blame for Kumar’s tragic end. The board of directors with its faulty policies started destroying the agency long back (at least before the corona-disaster). When they were in a sound financial position, the management launched a multi-lingual television news agency (UNI TV) primarily in English, Hindi, Urdu, etc, but it failed to generate adequate subscriptions seemingly because of unprofessional news intakes. For the unprofessionalism on part of the management, employees must not suffer. Let’s the UNI management promptly pay all the outstanding dues to the Kumar’s family, if not any compensatory amount at this moment.