P. S. Deodhar - Television for the Enrichment of the Info-Poor

TELEVISION FOR THE ENRICHMENT OF THE `INFO-POOR'

Why had Education via Television failed in India ?

Television is a medium for communicators. It is for the people with skills to reach out to the viewers and keep them engaged and attentively involved. It is about relating to remotely located strangers in their living rooms and bedrooms. In cinema halls audience is captive but not in case of television. It is, therefore, not the medium for teachers unless they are communiators having a knack to engage and attract. Many have an urge to teach, have a valuable message to deliver and yet, without the skill to attract their targets to television screens, they all fail, feel frustrated. Medium, unfortunately, is cold and has no sympathy for non-performers.

When even those teachers with intense motivation and sincere purpose fail, it is no wonder, therefore, that the Government funded NCERT, SIETs and TTTIs end up even more miserably. The central and the state governments have funded these institutions handsomely. They probably have studios for audio-visual production better equipped than even Doordarshan. Unfortunately good equipment alone isn't enough, one also needs the right talent. Government has failed to attract such talents with the essential attributes. Bureaucracy has a knack to kill all creative intiatives. Everyone is eventually turned into a babu. Institutions like the BBC are a rare happening. Institutions are best built around talents and not the other way round !

As opposed to this look at powerful communicators like Asaram Bapu and others. They are `using' the medium. With extraordinary communication skill and dynamic presence, they keep their viewers engaged and very powerfully `sell' the message they desire. Think why Discovery Channel succeeds or why even the documentaries by BBC are as engaging as mystery serials. Education too needs to be packaged for selling . No one is doing it for education in India today.

Why the info-poor suffer in this modern age ?

Illiteracy restricts and limits individual information net. Since the knowledge is locked up in print, it remains inaccessible to nirakshars. Learning is limited to the traditional sources, close within their surroundings and no more. This denies them access to a comfortable, easier and safer life. Lack of literacy and formal education also leads to ignorance of even the essentials, poor training in vocations and skills to use modern tools etc. It hurts productivity, leaving them socially and economically backward. It keeps the life of most of our rural folks, specially the women, stagnant, depriving them of essential information that has made the life of those `informed' healthier and more comfortable.

Ultimately it affects functional efficiency and productivity of our rural compatriots and their chances to join the mainstream as equals. It is indeed the root cause of almost all social ills such as poor personal and public health, lack of family planning, exploitation by the landlords and local Mafia etc.

My ten years in Delhi, in a close proximity of the power, gave me a feeling that there is a vested interest in keeping the masses where they are. They seem to fear that literacy of masses is a threat to their leadership, denying them the opportunity for exploiting the ignorance of the masses. It is very unfortunate that those exploited are blissfully unaware of what is hurting them. Centuries of exploitation have made them to mentally accept their inferiority. They accept their second rate citizenship status without revolting. No wonder, therefore, that while India progresses, Bharat is left to rot in the history.

However, let's not forget that these adults, even without literacy skills, are fully functional citizens, most of who have been successfully managing their life and raising families. The purpose and values in life are fixed in their mind through religious preaching and the social and personal discipline that comes via the family traiditions and the community.n Vocational skillsare being passes on through shagirdee. This has been happening in India very effectively for centuries. That's why poor amongst the Indians, unlike the poor in America, manage even their poverty well. They enjoy and laugh. Poverty doesn't turn them bitter, violent and aggressive like the westerners.

The only advantage gained by India, even though through a default, is escaping the ills of modernisation that's centred on materialism, leading to overall decadence and erosion of values in spite of the comforts and properity it brought. Saving ourselves from this hazard is by no means a small gain. Indeed, one should look at it as an opportunity of a kind, enabling India to avoid the machine age excesses that led to pollution, wastage of material resources and consequences of tampering with the nature. Knowledge Age will hopefully be an antidote to the machine age human errors.
Television is known to be a potent change agent, a cultural melting pot. If deployed imaginatively, it could prove to be a valuable tool for bringing about a more desirable social change. Television has played a major role in homogenising the heterogenous American society, giving it a common character, a unified identity and establishing a unique value system for all Americans irrespective of their colour, religion or the origin.

Is the missed opportunity again showing up ?

In 1986-87, as the Chairman of the Electronics Commission, I had plans to use the Electronic Media to enrich the illiterates, constituting 70% of country's population.

Concept was, on one hand, to use the television for quickly spreading the literacy, and on the other, to bypas the written word itself and deploy video and television to directly deliver life-enriching information. Television needs no skill except understanding the language. Since many amongst the illiterate masses have access to TV, it could be used to deliver information relating to, say, healthcare, vocational skills in agriculture and trades etc. To achieve this, the plan was to use communicators rather than teachers and deliver it in a form that looks more like entertainment than education. I soon realised that this can't be achieved through the Governmetn that is a captive of bureaucracy and one that lacks even the political will. It cannot have any role in this effort, certainly not the kind of governmetns we have had all these years.

My dream to use IT Technology to reach the illiterate, but otherwise fully functional, adults has yet remained so. Not being interested in politics and having got disillusioned with the bureaucracy and the politicians. I have shunned that route, even though, there have been requests to participate. Luckily, the economic and political scene has changed drastically in recent years. Thanks also to the rapid advances in space technology and telecommunications, Electronic Media too has better strengths. I now see a fresh opportunity to realise my elusive dreams.

What can be done ?

Many avenues exist. I mention just one for the spread of literacy. Consider this experiment.

STEP ONE :

a) There are only 28 consonants and 10 vowels in Sanskrit based languages using devanagari script. It is a phonetic script, having one letter represent one sound. Each akshara has a unique pronounciation. If one could correlated just 38 shapes of thse devanagari aksharas with their sounds, one can read almost everything ! Imagine, one learns to draw `pictures' of just 38 sounds and one is ready to read and write what one speaks ! That'' all one needs for the basic literacy !

b) We have with us people with exceptional communication skills to package powerful messages in 10 to 30 second time slots to sell any dream. Turn any non-essential into essential . Why not therefore have such 10 or 20 second spots of intelligently and engagingly produced visuals, like powerful commercials, each correlating one akshara with its sound. Telecast these `Akshara Spots' during all the popular TV programs to `fix' these images. Sell the Aksharas like the Liril soaps or paanmasalas. At least 50 to 100 illiterates will watch them in their own villages - 700,000 such communities all over the Indian subcontinent.

c) Will it work ? If the corporate world can create awareness and lure viewers to buy even the nonessentials far beyond their reach, this night work too. Provided of course that this imagery is created by the likes of Alyque Padamsees and Bharat Dabholkars of India.

STEP TWO :

d) Step one should be taken without any prior announcement of the project. Just start flashing the Akshara Spots, three to four of them each hour but with well worked out logistics. Let it get talked about. Create a mystery of a kind. After three to six months of transmitting these on all the channels, open a campaign to enthuse local social groups to gather the locals to learn the literacy skills formally. Everyone is by now exposed to Aksharas and ready for the next step.

e) For half an hour each day telecast Learning Lessons. Who scripts these ? The dramatists, master story tellers. Who delivers ? Madhuri Dixits, Nana Patekars and such crowd pullers. Those who would attract the illiterates to the television screens.

f) As these programs will attract large viewship amongst the masses, won't it also attract the advertisers ?