According to Jitendra Shankar Mathur, Special Secretary, The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), amongst the several parameters can be taken as the growth of any sector, advertising is a very major component, which also shows whether the sector is growing or not.
“In fact in entire media space, TV advertising grew by 22 per cent. Television industry contributes 40 per cent to the entire advertising pie. The way telecom sector boomed in 2004-05, today media and entertainment sector is growing is the same manner, commented Mathur.
Shedding the light on the growth of private FM radio sector, he mentioned that after the last exercise in 2005, it was only now in 2015 that it has moved ahead.
“The auctions have been very successful and now we are already in the process of next stage of the auction, which should take place in next 3-4 months”, informed Mathur.
Mathur also agreed that the one of the major issues of the media and entertainment industry is requirement of taking permissions. He mentioned that people often comment that what government is talking about ease of doing business, when primary permissions have been taking such a long time. However, he informed that the pace of permissions for various media activities has really scaled-up now and most of the long pending cases have already been resolved.
“But I am very happy that in last 6 months, most of these issues are sorted out and it was a wonderful experience. A lot of people were waiting for several kinds of permission, due to delay in getting the responses from various government wings. These kinds of issues were sorted out and now it’s not really that difficult to get permission”, expressed Mathur.
Talking about the digitisation, Mathur opined that there are almost 6000-7000 urban centres across the country and it’s the vast democracy where we are facing some legal matters. But yet, we have been able to digitised in the 1st three phases of digitisation is close to 70 million households. However, the ultimate target of 168 million households with TV sets is huge.
Sharing his thoughts on broadcasting policy he mentioned that government is very keen on scaling up the interaction on broadcast policy, in order to work towards having the broadcast policy.
“With the active support from TRAI, within the next month all the major stakeholders and ministry are going to get together to discuss how and in what manner we can resolve the issue of scarcity of transponders in the country”, commented Mathur.
Mathur further shared his thoughts on issued of Ad Cap and he opined that according to a CASBAA report, in Asia Pacific region every country has something or other on advertising cap. Regulations are all over and will be there.
He mentioned that there was a time when this industry was considered as just a glamour industry and now it’s turned out to be a very basic industry. There are things need to be done to facilitate the growth of M&E industry. Now, content from Indian Television is reaching to the global audience and movies are making marks in international film festivals.
“There are million people associated with M&E industry directly or indirectly. Media and Entertainment sector has tremendous potential for its growth. It has capacity to generate employment and also holds capacity to make others look up to India and put it on the global map. We are looking at the vision of making India $100 million industry for M&E and this has to go tremendously”, concluded Mathur.
Jitendra Shankar Mathur, Special Secretary, The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) shared his views while delivering special keynote address at Casbaa India Forum 2016
