India and its archaic media laws

The regulations governing the print media in India must be the most archaic in the world. Everything from title registration and employment conditions to newsprint entitlements, is subject to a law that has been by-passed by events. It is time for comprehensive change.

Government statistics tell us that there are some 5,000 daily newspapers in India, and another 50,000 periodicals. But the Indian Newspaper Society has only 700 members. The Audit Bureau of Circulations covers barely 250 dailies. The major readership surveys also cover about 250 publications. That's the universe that matters.

If we group them by size, there are a dozen giant newspapers that sell more than a million copies each, with a combined circulation of 16-17 million. Then there are 20 large ones (0.3-1 million circulation) that sell up to 10 million copies in all.

The medium-sized ones (100,000-300,000 circulation) are 30-40, but do not cross 5-6 million in combined sales. And the couple of hundred small ones (25,000 to 100,000 copies) have another small part of the pie. In all, the total sales of all 250-odd newspapers would be about 40 million. With multiple readers per copy, this squares with the survey finding that India has 160 million newspaper readers.

When we look at government actions with regard to this increasingly important industry, the first problem is data. The figures with the Registrar of Newspapers have no intersection with reality, and no one looks at balance sheets or share of ad market.

The registrar maintains an archaic system for registering titles, when the entire system should be scrapped and merged with the trademarks rules (today you can own a newspaper title while someone else owns the trade mark).

And the government runs a typically confused system for issuing advertisements, supposedly skewed in favour of thousands of tiny newspapers - most of them entities that exist merely to claim government ad money.

What should the government be doing? As little as possible, other than tracking the data - on share of voice, for instance, to see whether plurality exists. Typically, we find one dominant newspaper in each language or region, competing with a couple of large ones - and these account for most of the sales.

So, while no single newspaper accounts for even 2 per cent of all-India copy sales, there can be dominance in specific sub-markets. Despite this oligopolistic structure, and despite signs of consolidation, markets remain competitive.

Second would be to track business health, i.e. the share of the advertising market that goes to each title.

The picture here would look more skewed in favour of the dominant or large publications, but once again there is enough competition to ensure a multiplicity of media outlets - especially when one looks at the different media available (print and electronic). All that the government needs to do is to let commercial considerations determine its own advertising decisions, and stop patronising non-existent titles.

Third would be to deal with a variety of business issues. The system of wage boards has outlived its utility - the market has gone beyond wage board-determined salaries where it counts, and the smaller titles have never honoured wage board decrees anyway. The law that governs the working conditions of journalists is similarly dated and should be scrapped - general industrial laws are good enough to cover the industry.

Then, why have a rule that says you can import newsprint only if the registrar of newspapers gives you a certificate? And as for ownership, foreign ownership today can be 26 per cent or 100 per cent, depending on the publication category.

It would be simpler and more logical to do away with today's complicated approval process and allow 100 per cent foreign ownership in niche publications of all kinds (those that sell fewer than 25,000 copies), up to 49 per cent in small and medium newspapers provided the largest shareholder is Indian, and with the same proviso of 26 per cent in large and giant ones.

By definition, publications that grow from one category to the next would have to dilute their foreign shareholding, so there would be no need for politicians to worry about media control in the large titles that reach most readers.