Before the Market: Controlled Media and the Bazaar, 1947 to 1991

A single voice for a new republic

India's government inherited a radio network built for a colonial administration, not a mass audience. At independence in August 1947, All India Radio operated only six stations, in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Tiruchirapalli and Lucknow, serving roughly 250,000 radio sets across the entire country. By one academic accounting, radio reached only 11 percent of India's population and covered just 2.5 percent of its area. For most of the country, the newest mass medium of the twentieth century simply did not arrive.

The government's response was not to open broadcasting to competition but to keep it a state monopoly and use it, deliberately, as an instrument of nation-building. A country assembled from princely states and provinces, freshly partitioned, and speaking dozens of languages needed, in the founding generation's view, a broadcaster that spoke as one voice rather than many competing ones. The same instinct produced the Films Division of India, set up within the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1948 to make documentaries and newsreels for government publicity, screened before the commercial feature in cinemas across the country. It was the state's own marketing surface, built to sell citizenship and development, not soap or cigarettes.

Cinema itself needed no such sponsorship to reach people. Indian cinema had already become, by industry accounts, the world's second-largest film industry during the 1950s, with a gross annual income of about 250 million rupees in 1953 alone. Between 1954 and 1991, Indian studios sent 206 films to the Soviet Union, where titles such as Awaara reportedly drew audiences larger than most domestic Soviet releases. Radio was thin and closely held; cinema, even under a controlled economy, was already a genuine mass medium.

What neither medium reached, radio because its signal did not extend there and cinema because a ticket cost money and a theater required travel, was the daily business of finding a good or a service. For that, in 1947 as for generations before, most Indians relied on people they knew rather than any medium at all, a pattern this piece returns to later.

The permit economy and a market too thin to advertise to

The economic order that would govern India for the next four decades took shape almost immediately. The Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951 required a license for nearly any industrial activity: starting a new unit, expanding capacity, or even changing what a factory made. Business-press retrospectives on the period note that as many as 80 separate government agencies could be involved in approving a private company's production plans. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 split industry into three schedules: 17 industries reserved exclusively for the state, including atomic energy, defense and iron and steel; 12 more in which the state would take a progressively larger stake; and the remainder left to private firms but still subject to licensing.

The consumer-facing result of this system is well documented in the era's own folklore, and much of that folklore is accurate. Car buyers chose between two or three approved models, typically in a single color, because production runs were fixed by license rather than by demand. The Bajaj Chetak scooter, produced under a quota of roughly 20,000 units a year, reportedly carried waiting lists of up to a decade, a delay one industry account calls possibly a record for a consumer product anywhere. A secondary market in licenses themselves developed, in which firms sometimes acquired a license defensively, to keep a competitor from expanding, rather than to build anything at all. The Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act of 1969 added a further layer of approval for large business houses, and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973 capped foreign equity at 40 percent, a restriction strict enough that Coca-Cola and IBM chose to leave India rather than comply.

Economists later gave this period's growth rate a name: Raj Krishna's "Hindu rate of growth," roughly 3.5 percent a year on average between 1965 and 1980. The connection to advertising is direct rather than incidental. When the state, not demand, decides what gets made and how much of it, a manufacturer's problem is production capacity, not persuasion, and a product that will sell out regardless has little reason to fund a marketing campaign. One retrospective industry accounting puts total spending on print advertising and hoardings combined at only about 5 crore rupees, 50 million rupees, across the entire 1947 to 1977 period, roughly 3.5 crore on print and 1.5 crore on outdoor hoardings, rising to around 200 crore rupees by the early 1980s as the licensing system began to loosen, including a "broad-banding" policy that let firms shift their product mix within a category without a fresh license. That is not a large industry by any standard, but the growth it shows tracks the licensing system's own modest easing, not any sudden change in how persuasive Indian advertising had become.

Commercial radio, at last, and a television service finds its feet

All India Radio's one true entertainment channel, Vividh Bharati, began broadcasting on 3 October 1957, created specifically to compete with the Hindi film music that Radio Ceylon was drawing Indian listeners toward. For its first decade, Vividh Bharati carried film songs and variety programming but no advertising of any kind; a state broadcaster, in the founding logic, did not sell time to advertisers. The government's own first independent review of broadcasting, chaired by Ashok K. Chanda and appointed on 4 December 1964, changed that logic. The Chanda Committee reported in 1966 and recommended, among other findings, that advertising would be the most productive new source of revenue for All India Radio; its separate proposal to spin radio and television into autonomous corporations was rejected, but the advertising recommendation was accepted.

On 1 November 1967, twenty years after independence, All India Radio switched on its Commercial Broadcasting Service. The first paid spots, sold in one-minute units, ran on Vividh Bharati's Bombay-Poona-Nagpur relay chain. It was the first time any Indian mass medium had carried paid commercial persuasion, and even then the service stayed confined to a handful of cities for years.

Television developed even more slowly. Doordarshan's first transmission was an experimental broadcast from a makeshift Delhi studio on 15 September 1959, run administratively as part of All India Radio; regular daily transmission did not begin until 1965, and the service is remembered as starting with only a few dozen sets in the capital. Krishi Darshan, an agricultural-extension program that debuted on 26 January 1967, remains Indian television's longest-running show, and its subject matter, farm productivity rather than consumer choice, is a fair summary of what television was built to do in this period: carry development messaging, not sell products.

The service crept outward only gradually. Television reached Bombay and Amritsar in 1972, and as late as 1975, only seven Indian cities had any television service at all. On the eve of the political crisis that would consume the next two years, the newest marketing surface in the country remained, by any commercial measure, negligible.

The Emergency and the fight over who controls the signal

In the early hours of 26 June 1975, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declared a national Emergency. Electricity to the Delhi neighborhood where most newspaper offices were headquartered was cut before dawn, so no paper could print; most Indians first learned of the Emergency the next morning from All India Radio, the one medium the government fully controlled. The Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter Act made pre-publication censorship part of ordinary law, and the Press Council of India, established in 1966 to safeguard press freedom, was abolished by ordinance.

The record of what followed is specific and well documented. K.R. Malkani, editor of Motherland and Organiser, was the first journalist arrested and remained jailed throughout the 21-month Emergency. The Indian Express and the Statesman protested by running blank editorial columns. Motherland, the only paper that managed to report the Emergency's declaration on the day itself, had its own office's power cut off. By the Home Ministry's own count, close to 7,000 journalists and media workers had been arrested by May 1976, and Freedom House's global ranking of press freedom placed India third at the start of the 1970s and 34th during the 1975 to 1977 period.

Doordarshan, still the country's only television channel, carried the government's account of events through this period, a role that made questions about its independence unavoidable once the Emergency ended in March 1977. The incoming Janata government appointed a working group on 17 August 1977, chaired by the journalist B.G. Verghese, to examine whether All India Radio and Doordarshan should become autonomous. The Verghese Committee reported on 24 February 1978 that the executive, in its own words, had been "abetted by a captive Parliament" and had "shamelessly misused the broadcasting during emergency," and it recommended a National Broadcasting Trust to be called Akash Bharati.

The Janata government fell before it could turn that recommendation into law, and the argument over who should control India's state broadcaster, opened in this period, would not be settled within this era at all. It resurfaces at the end of this piece.

A nation watches together: satellite, color and the sponsored serial

India's satellite ambitions began as a one-year experiment. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, a joint project of the Indian Space Research Organisation and NASA, ran from 1 August 1975 to 31 July 1976, using NASA's ATS-6 satellite to beam programming on health, hygiene, family planning and agriculture into more than 2,400 villages across 20 districts in six states, twice a day. Its purpose was explicitly developmental rather than commercial, but its real legacy was technical: it proved India could operate a satellite broadcasting service, and it fed directly into the design of the country's own Indian National Satellite System.

That system had a rough start. INSAT-1A launched on 10 April 1982 but failed within months and was abandoned that September. Its replacement, INSAT-1B, launched on 30 August 1983 and became operational that October; around 35,000 earth receiving stations were built to take its signal, finally giving Doordarshan a genuinely national network rather than a scatter of city-bound transmitters.

Color television arrived in the same short window. Doordarshan's first color broadcast carried Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Independence Day address on 15 August 1982, followed by color coverage of the Ninth Asian Games, held in Delhi from 19 November to 4 December 1982. Adoption still lagged badly behind the technology: television licensing, abolished only in early 1985, had issued just 404 licenses in 1965 and 455,430 by 1975, and the national total of sets stood at only 5.2 million when licensing ended. Two million further sets, 800,000 of them color, sold in 1985 alone, as licensing ended and prices began to fall.

Into that newly networked, slowly coloring country came Hum Log, which premiered on 7 July 1984 as Indian television's first serial drama and its first sponsored program. Nestle's Maggi noodles and the detergent brand Nirma backed the show, and narrator Ashok Kumar's closing remarks, which tied each week's family storyline to a public-service message, helped draw an audience its own producers estimated at more than 50 million viewers an episode across a seventeen-month run. It was the moment sponsorship, distinct from the one-minute radio spot of 1967, became a working model on Indian television, seven years before liberalization would make that model the industry's default.

The agencies that built Indian advertising

A market this constrained still produced a real professional industry, one organized enough to matter once liberalization arrived. The Advertising Agencies Association of India was registered in Calcutta on 21 September 1945, two years before independence, by seven founding agencies: four from Calcutta, D J Keymer, General Advertising Agency, J Walter Thompson Co. and Press Syndicate, and three from Bombay, Adarts, Lintas and National Advertising Service. The association moved its headquarters to Bombay in 1961, tracking the city that had already become the country's advertising capital.

How India found what it needed: the bazaar, the mandi, the kirana

For most transactions in this era, none of the surfaces described above mattered, because discovery ran on an infrastructure that had almost nothing to do with any medium. Maharashtra passed India's first Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act in 1963, and other states followed through the 1960s and 1970s, formalizing the mandi, the regulated wholesale market, as the place where produce was priced, weighed and sold under a committee's supervision. But the institution that governed most day-to-day consumer purchases was smaller and entirely informal: the neighborhood kirana store, whose owner tracked regular customers by name, extended credit against a handwritten ledger, and functioned as much as a community meeting point as a shop.

The formal aids to discovery that a market economy usually supplies were close to absent. India's telephone network reflected the same scarcity the license raj imposed on everything else: the country had fewer than ten lakh, one million, telephone connections at independence, and one telecom-history account notes that between 1947 and 1981 "tele-density did not add up to much, given poor infrastructure, red tape in allocation of telephone connection, and generally low business activity." By 1991, at the very end of this era, India still had fewer than one telephone line for every 100 people. A trade or telephone directory only has value in a country where enough people own a telephone to look someone up on; India would not clear that bar within this era, and a dedicated Yellow Pages directory would not arrive until 1994, three years after it closes.

In that gap, word of mouth carried the authority that a directory, a search engine, or an advertisement carries today. A recommendation from a neighbor, a relative or a fellow trader mattered more than anything printed or broadcast, because what was printed or broadcast reached only a thin, largely urban slice of the country. This is the mirror image of the marketing story told above: a state that held the microphone and an economy that held the factory both left the ordinary business of being found to the oldest mechanism available, personal trust, moving through the bazaar and the kirana rather than through any medium at all.

1991: a monopoly ends

The broadcasting question the Verghese Committee raised in 1978 took twelve more years to reach Parliament. The Prasar Bharati Act, finally granting autonomy to All India Radio and Doordarshan, received presidential assent on 12 September 1990. But assent was not implementation: successive governments left Doordarshan and All India Radio as departments of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for another seven years, and Prasar Bharati was not actually brought into force until 15 September 1997. The clearest lesson of this era's broadcasting politics, that Parliament can legislate independence and the executive can simply decline to switch it on, was set here and left for the years that followed to resolve.

The economic monopoly broke first, and it broke under duress rather than design. By January 1991, India's foreign exchange reserves stood at roughly 1.2 billion US dollars, enough to cover about three weeks of imports, and had fallen by half by June. The New Industrial Policy of 1991 abolished licensing across most sectors, a direct response to that crisis rather than a change of philosophy.

Television's monopoly ended within the same twelve months. In December 1991, Star TV launched four channels, including MTV and the BBC World Service, into a broadcasting space Doordarshan alone had occupied since 1959. Within a single calendar year, the three structures this piece has described, one state broadcaster, an economy too constrained to need much advertising, and a discovery system built on the bazaar and the kirana, all began to give way at once.

The next entry in this series, The Opening: Liberalization and the Satellite Invasion, 1991 to 2000, picks up exactly here, with the dish antenna, the private channel, and a consumer market finally permitted to exist. What this era leaves behind is the baseline against which that opening should be measured: 44 years in which reach was licensed and discovery was personal.