A whopping Rs. 214 crore in the form of advertising revenue is owed to Indian pubcaster Doordarshan and All India Radio by private companies as of March 2022.

“The total pending dues of Akashwani and Doordarshan pertaining to advertisements of private companies, as on 31.03.2022, is Rs. 214.24 crore,” Minister of Information and Broadcasting informed Lok Sabha (Lower House of parliament) on Tuesday.

The Minister was replying to a query from a fellow parliamentarian on the financial performance of the Indian public broadcasters.

According to data provided by Thakur, the total income of AIR and DD from advertisement, serials and other programmes during the last three years are as follows: in the year 2019-20 the income was Rs. 653.04 crore; year 2020-21 it was Rs. 475.91 crore and year 2021-22 it was Rs. 464.44 crore (provisional).

Thakur justified the revenues by saying as pubcasters DD and AIR’s main aim was to inform, educate and entertain, and not solely focus on commercial revenues.

“Prasar Bharati (DD and AIR’s parent) is the public broadcaster and its primary duty is to carry out public broadcasting services to inform, educate and entertain the public and to ensure a balanced development of broadcasting on radio and television. Its purpose is not solely commercial but to reach those areas where no private broadcaster would venture, the Minister explained.

Prasar Bharati is publicly funded with the funds coming via MIB.

However, Thakur also clarified that both the pubcasters have initiated suitable actions to recover the pending dues.

“Prasar Bharati has put in place a system to monitor the collection of outstanding dues regularly and it follows up with private companies for recovery of outstanding dues. Various actions such as encashment of bank guarantee, invocation of arbitration, etc. are also resorted to,” the Minister added.

DD’s Gross Viewership: Meanwhile, replying to another question on Doordarshan’s viewership patterns and whether there has been a fall in the number of people watching pubcatser’s channels, Thakur clarified that DD has “overall maintained” the same position compared to private sector TV channels.

“Prasar Bharati has informed that Doordarshan channels have overall maintained almost the same positions in their genres vis-a-vis private channels in the last three years as per Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) ratings,” Thakur said.

For example, till the second week of July 2022 or Week28 of BARC India audience data, DD channels’ (standard definition version) unique gross viewership was 633.1 million, while in 2019 the comparative figure was 760.4 millions.

In 2020 the gross viewership for DD’s SD channels were 747.0 million and in 2021 it 684.9 million, which included viewership data for DD News and DD India till October 2, 2020 and then from December 2021 and March 2022.

“Doordarshan is committed to quality content and have accordingly taken several steps to produce and acquire high quality programmes for its network. DD has also launched Content Sourcing Portal for submission of suo-moto proposals under Direct Assignment Process (DAP) by production houses. Doordarshan Kendras across the country are upgraded with the introduction of latest equipments video walls etc. for quality production. The quality of program production, post production and telecast/broadcast has improved with the modernization/upgradation,” Thakur added, hinting at steps taken to further augment viewership.