Broadcasting began in India with the formation of a private radio service in Madras in 1924. In the same year, the British colonial government granted a license to a private company, the Indian Broadcasting Company, to open radio stations in Bombay and Calcutta. The company went bankrupt in 1930, but the colonial government took over the two transmitters, and the Department of Labour and Industries started operating them as the Indian State Broadcasting Corporation. In 1936, the corporation was renamed All India Radio (AIR) and placed under the Department of Communications. When India became independent in 1947, AIR was made a separate department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

     The early history of radio broadcasting in independent India is important because it set the parameters for the subsequent role of television in the country. At independence, the Congress government under Jawa­harlal Nehru planned to achieve political integration, economic development, and social modernization. Broadcasting was expected to play an important role in all three areas. The most important challenge the government faced at independence was that of forging a nation out of the diverse political, religious, geo­ graphic, and linguistic entities that composed independent India. In addition to the territories ruled directly by the British, over 500 "independent" princely states had joined the new nation, some quite reluctantly. The country immediately found itself at war with Pakistan over one of those states, Kashmir. The trauma of the partition of the country into India and Pakistan, and the violence between Hindus and Muslims, had further weakened the political stability of the country. Broadcasting was harnessed for the task of political nation building. National integration and the development of a "national consciousness" were among the early objectives of All India Radio.

     Broadcasting was organized as the sole preserve of the chief architect of this process of political integration-the state. The task of broadcasting was to help in overcoming the immediate crisis of political instability that followed independence, and to foster the long­ term process of political modernization and nation­ building that was the dominant ideology of the newly formed state. Broadcasting was also charged with the task of aiding in the process of economic development. The Indian Constitution, adopted in 1950, mandated a strong role for the Indian state in the economic development of the country. The use of broadcasting to further the development process was a natural corollary to this state-led developmental philosophy. Broadcasting was especially expected to contribute to the process of social modernization, which was considered an important prerequisite of economic development. The dominant development philosophy of the time identified the problems of development as being primarily internal to developing countries. These endogenous causes, to which communications solutions were thought to exist, included traditional value systems, lack of innovation, lack of an entrepreneurial culture, and lack of a national consciousness. In short, the problem was one of old ideas hindering the process of social change and modernization and the role of broadcasting was to provide an outlet for the flow of modern ideas.

     It was in the context of this dominant thinking about the role of broadcasting in India that television was introduced in 1959. The government had been reluctant to invest in television until then because the general consensus was that a poor country like India could not afford the medium. Television had to prove its role in the development process before it could gain a foothold in the country. Television broadcasts started from Delhi in September 1959 as part of All India Radio's services. Programs were broadcast twice a week for an hour a day on such topics as community health, citizens' duties and rights, and traffic and road sense. In 1961 the broadcasts were expanded to include a school educational television project. In time, Indian films and programs consisting of compilations of musical numbers from Indian films joined the program lineup as the first entertainment programs. A limited number of old U.S. and British shows were also telecast sporadically.

     The first major expansion of television in India began in 1972, when a second television station was opened in Bombay (now Mumbai). This was followed by stations in Srinagar and Amritsar (1973), and Calcutta, Madras (now Chennai), and Lucknow in 1975. Relay stations were also set up in a number of cities to extend the coverage of the regional stations. In 1975, the government carried out the first test of the possibilities of satellite-based television through the SITE program. SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) was designed to test whether satellite-based television services could play a role in socioeconomic development. Using a U.S. ATS-6 satellite and up-link centers at Ahmedabad and Delhi, television programs were beamed down for about 4 hours a day to about 2,400 villages in 6 states. The programs dealt mainly with in- and out-of-school education, agricultural issues, planning, and national integration. The experiment was fairly successful in demonstrating the effectiveness of satellite-based television in India, and the lessons learnt from SITE were used by the government in designing and utilizing its own domestic satellite service INSAT, launched in 1982.

     In these early years, television, like radio, was considered a facilitator of the development process, and its introduction was justified by the role it was asked to play in social and economic development. Television was institutionalized as an arm of the government, since the government was the chief architect of political, economic and social development in the country.

     By 1976, the government found itself running a television network of eight television stations covering a population of 45 million spread over 29,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers). Faced with the difficulty of administering such an extensive television system as part of All India Radio, the government constituted Doordar­shan, the national television network, as an attached office under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting-a half-way house between a public corporation and a government department. In practice, however, Door­ darshan, whose director general was appointed by the ministry, operated much like a government department, at least as far as critical issues of policy, planning and financial decision-making were concerned.

     Television went through major changes under what has been called, in the official language, The Special Expansion Plan for Tv, an important state initiative in (re)organizing television during the 1980s. In 1982 television began to attain national coverage and develop as the government's pre-eminent media organization. Two events triggered the rapid growth of television that year. INSAT-1 A, the first of the country's domestic communications satellites became operational and made possible the networking of all of Doordarshan's regional stations. For the first time Do­ordarshan originated a nation-wide feed dubbed the "National Programme," which was fed from Delhi to the other stations. In November 1982, the country hosted the Asian Games and the government introduced color broadcasts for the coverage of the games. To increase television's reach, the government launched a crash program to set up low- and high­-power transmitters that would pick up the satellite­ distributed signals and re-transmit them to surrounding areas. In 1983 television signals were available to just 28 percent of the population; this had doubled by the end of 1985, and by 1990 over 90 percent of the population had access to television signals.

     In 1976 a significant event in the history of Indian television occurred: the advent of advertising on Door­darshan. Until that time television had been funded through a combination of television licenses and allocations from the annual budget (licenses were later abolished as advertising revenues began to increase substantially). Advertising began in a very small way with less than I percent of Doordarshan's budget coming from advertising revenues in the 1976-77 season. But the possibility of reaching a nationwide audience made television look increasingly attractive to advertisers after the introduction of the "National Programme" in 1982. In tum, Doordarshan began to shift the balance of its programming from educational and informational programs to entertainment programs. The commercialization of Doordarshan saw the development of soap operas, situation comedies, dramas, musical programs, quiz shows, and the like. By 1990, Doordarshan's revenues from advertising were about $300 million, accounting for about 70 percent of its annual expenditure.

     By 1991, Doordarshan's earlier mandate to aid in the process of social and economic development had clearly been diluted. Entertainment and commercial programs had begun to take center stage in the organization's programming strategies, and advertising had come to be Doordarshan's main source of funding. However, television in India was still a modest enterprise, with most parts of the country receiving just one channel, and the major cities receiving two. But 1991 saw the beginnings of international satellite broadcasting in India, and the government launched a major economic liberalization program. Both these events combined to change the country's television environment dramatically.

     International satellite television was introduced in India by CNN, through its coverage of the First Gulf War in 1991. Three months later, Hong Kong-based Star-TV (now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) started broadcasting five channels into India using the ASIASAT-1 satellite. By early 1992, nearly half a million Indian households were receiving Star­ TV telecasts. A year later the figure was close to 2 million, and by the end of 1994, an estimated 12 million households (a little less than one-fourth of all television households) were receiving satellite channels. This increase in viewership was made possible by the 60,000 or so small-scale cable system operators who mushroomed across the country. These systems redistributed the satellite channels to their customers at rates as low as $5 a month. Taking advantage of the growth of the satellite television audience, a number of Indian satellite-based television services were launched between 1991 and 1994, prominent among them ZeeTV, the first Hindi satellite channel. By the end of 1994 there were 12 satellite-based channels available in In­dia, all of them using a handful of different satellites. By the end of 2003, Indian viewers were exposed to more than 50 satellite-based channels, with a number of Indian programmers and international media companies such as Turner Broadcasting, Time-Warner, ESPN, CANAL 5, and Pearsons seriously considering the introduction of new satellite television services for India. The steep rise in channel availability has led to a major increase in software and program production from both local Indian and multinational corporations.

     The proliferation of channels has put great pressure on the Indian television programming industry. Already the largest producer of motion pictures, India is poised to become a sizable producer of television programs as well. With Indian audiences clearly preferring locally produced programs over foreign ones, the new television services are spending heavily on the development of indigenous programs. The number of hours of television programming produced in India has increased 800 percent between 1991 and 2003, and is expected to grow at an ever-faster rate in the future.

     Despite the rapid growth in the number of television channels, television programming continues to be dominated by the Indian film industry. Hindi films are the staple of most national channels, and regional channels rely heavily on a mix of Hindi and regional­ language films to attract audiences. Almost all Indian commercial films are musicals, and this allows for the development of inexpensive, derivative programs. One of Doordarshan's most popular programs, Chitrahaar, is a compilation of old film songs, and all the private channels, including ZeeTV and music video channels such as MTV India and Channel V, show some variation of Chitrahaar. A number of game shows are also based on movie themes. Other genres, such as soap operas, talk shows, and situation comedies are also gaining in popularity, but the production of these programs has been unable to keep up with demand, hence the continuing reliance on film-based programming.

     International satellite programming has opened up competition in news and public affairs programming, with BBC and CNN International challenging Door­ darshan's long-standing monopoly. Most of the other foreign broadcasters, for example, ESPN and the Discovery Channel, are focusing on special-interest programming. Only Star-TV's STAR Plus channel offers broad-based English-language entertainment programs. Most of its programs are syndicated U.S. shows, including soap operas such as The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara and talk shows such as Donahue and Oprah. However, STAR Plus has a very small share of the audience in India and even this is threatened by the launch of new channels.

     Since 1996 the televisual "map" of India has undergone considerable shifts in structural terms and programme production. The contemporary television system includes transnational satellite networks and channels, the state-run national network, several privately owned regional satellite channels, and numerous small and large-scale cable operators involved in creation and transmission of consumerist popular culture. An interesting feature has been the formation of a range of regional television networks like Gemini, Eenadu, Asianet, Sun, Udaya, Surya, Vijay that exist alongside the transnational networks like StarTV, Zee, Sony, MTV India, Channel V, CNN India, and the state-run television.

     A peculiar development in television programming in India has been the use of hybrid English-Hindi program formats, popularly called "Hinglish" formats, which offer programs in Hindi and English on the same channel and even have programs, including news shows, that use both languages within a single telecast. This takes advantage of the audience for television (especially the audience for satellite television) which is largely composed of middle-class Indians who have some knowledge of English along with Hindi, and who colloquially speak a language that is primarily Hindi intermixed with words, phrases, and whole sentences in English. There are several other regional languages in which programs are produced that also mix English with various regional languages. This kind of hybrid program format and language-use has led to interesting phenomena that provides an ostensible cosmopolitan context to the programs.

     Commercial competition has transformed Doordar­shan as well, and it is scrambling to cope with the changed competitive environment. Satellite broadcasting has-threatened Doordarshan's audiences, and self­ preservation has spawned a new ideology in the network, which is in the process of reinventing itself, co-opting private programmers to recapture viewers and advertising rupees lost to ZeeTV and StarTV. In 1994, the government ordered Doordarshan to raise its own revenues for future expansion. This new commercial mandate has gradually begun to change Doordar­ shan's perception of who its primary constituents are, from politicians to advertisers.

     But this change has been slow in coming. The government's monopoly over television over the years has resulted in Doordarshan being tightly controlled by successive governments. In principle, Doordarshan is answerable only to Parliament. Parliament lays down the guidelines that Doordarshan is expected to adhere to in its programming and Doordarshan's budget is debated and approved by Parliament. But the guidelines established by Parliament to ensure Doordarshan's political neutrality are largely ignored in the face of the majority that different ruling parties have held in Parliament. Doordarshan has been subject more to the will of the government than the oversight of Parliament. Successive governments and ruling political parties have used Doordarshan to further their political agendas, weakening its credibility as a neutral participant in the political process. There have been periodic attempts to reconstitute Doordarshan into a BBC-like public corporation, but governments have been reluctant to relin­ quish their hold on such a powerful medium.

The government bases its right to operate the country's broadcasting services as a monopoly from the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, which empowered the government with the exclusive right to "establish, maintain and work" telegraph, and later wireless services. In addition, the Constitution lists broadcasting as falling solely within the domain of Parliament, effectively shutting out the state governments from making any laws with regard to television. Within the ambit of these provisions it was assumed that media autonomy or liberalization in any form was the prerogative of the government to grant. But the government's monopoly was challenged in the Indian Supreme Court in 1995. The court held that the government monopoly over broadcasting was unconstitutional, and while the government has the right to regulate broadcasting in the public interest, the Constitution forbids monopoly control over any medium by either individuals or the government. The court directed the government to establish an independent public authority for "controlling and regulating" the use of airwaves. The court's decision holds out the promise of significant structural changes in Indian broadcasting and the possibility that terrestrial television may finally free itself from governmental control.

     It is evident that over time the control of the Indian state over television will continue to diminish. With changes in its revenue structure and the need to respond to increasing commercial pressures, the character of Doordarshan's programming has increasingly begun to reflect the demands and pressures of the marketplace. In the meantime, caught between the government and the market, Doordarshan continues to struggle to maintain its mandate of public-service programming. The Supreme Court's decision ordering the government to establish an independent broadcasting authority to regulate television in the public interest holds the promise of allowing Indian television to escape both the stifling political control of the state and the commercial pressures of the market. There are a number of other constituencies, such as state governments, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, and social-service agencies who can participate in a liberalized broadcast system, in addition to private corporations. A number of technological factors, such as media convergence, broadband internet delivery, and Direct-to-Home (DTH) satellite transmissions will also be instrumental in the shaping of the future of India's television system. More importantly, the coexistence of state, domestic private, and multinational corporations-and the rapid rise of consumerist-oriented entertainment, religious-based programming, talk shows, game shows, news, and current affairs-indicates that the discourses of nationalism, globalization, and localization all remain powerful vectors for the televisual system and its audiences both within and outside the borders of the postcolonial Indian nation-state.