India is a major regional center for cinema. The Indian film industry is the largest in the world (1200 movies released in the year 2002). Each of the larger languages supports its own film industry: Urdu/Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam. The Hindi/Urdu film industry, based in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is called Bollywood (a melding of Hollywood and Bombay). Similar neologisms have been coined for the Kannada (Karnataka State) film industry (Sandalwood) based on Karnataka being known for Sandalwood, Tamil film industry (Kollywood, from the Kodambakkam district of Chennai) and the Telugu film industry (Tollywood). Tollygunge is a metonym for the Bengali film industry, long centered in the Tollygunge district of Kolkata.

The Bengali language industry is notable as having nurtured the director Satyajit Ray, an internationally renowned filmmaker and a winner of many awards, among them the Bharat Ratna (India’s highest civilian award), the Legion d’honneur (France), and the Lifetime achievement Academy Award. The Bollywood industry is usually the largest in terms of films produced and box office receipts, just as Urdu/Hindi speakers outnumber speakers of other Indian languages within India. (Tollywood is close on Bollywood’s heels, and sometimes will turn out more films in a year.)

In addition to commercial cinema, there is also high-minded Indian art cinema, known to film critics as “New Indian Cinema” or sometimes “the Indian New Wave”. Most people in India simply call such films “art films” as opposed to mainstream commercial cinema. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the art film was usually government-supported cinema. Aspiring directors could get federal or state government grants to produce non-commercial films on Indian themes. Many of these directors were graduates of the government film school (FTII or Film and Television Institute of India). Their films were showcased at government film festivals and on the government-run TV station, Doordarshan. These films also had limited runs in art house theatres in India and overseas.

Radio

Radio broadcasting was, until recently a government monopoly under the Directorate General of All India Radio–established in 1936 and since 1957 also known as Akashvani–a government-owned, semicommercial operation of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. From only six stations at the time of independence, All India Radio’s network had expanded by the mid-1990s to 146 AM stations plus a National Channel, the Integrated North-East Service (aimed at tribal groups in northeast India), and the External Service. There are five regional headquarters for All India Radio: the North Zone in New Delhi; the North-East Zone in Guwahati, Assam; the East Zone in Calcutta; the West Zone in Bombay; and the South Zone in Madras. All India Radio covers 99.37% of India’s populace.

The government-owned network provides both national and local programs in Hindi, English, and sixteen regional languages. Commercial services, which were inaugurated in 1967, are provided by Vividh Bharati Service, headquartered in Mumbai. Vividh Bharati, which accepts advertisements, broadcasts from thirty-one AM and FM stations in the mid-1990s.

India has an extensive network of mediumwave and shortwave stations. In 1994 there were eighty-five FM stations and seventy-three shortwave stations that covered the entire country. The broadcasting equipment is mostly Indian made and reaches special audiences, such as farmers needing agroclimatic, plant protection, and other agriculture-related information. The number of radio receivers increased almost fivefold between 1970 and 1994, from around 14 million to nearly 65 million. Most radios are also produced within India.

The foreign broadcast service is a function of the External Services Division of All India Radio. In 1994 seventy hours of news, features, and entertainment programs were broadcast daily in twenty-five languages using thirty-two shortwave transmitters. The principal target audiences are listeners in neighboring countries and the large overseas Indian community.

Satellite Radio was introduced to the Indian market in 2000 by WorldSpace, a Washington-DC based company. Currently WorldSpace beams 30 channels comprising music, news, and regional channels, a subscriber in India pays Rs 1,200 per annum. In addition, some premium channels are available at an extra cost. This service requires special receivers which are often subsidized by worldspace.

Recently The Department of Space (DoS) indicated it is exploring the possibility of setting up a multi-media satellite platform that would include satellite radio, video and data channels.

Television

Television service is available throughout the country. Doordarshan is a government-owned broadcaster established in 1959 and a part of All India Radio until 1976. It operates of one national network and seven regional networks. In 1992 there were sixty-three high-power television transmitters, 369 medium-power transmitters, seventy-six low-power transmitters, and twenty-three transposers. Regular satellite transmissions began in 1982 (the same year color transmission began).

By 1994 some 6 million people were receiving television broadcasts via satellite, and the number was expected to increase rapidly throughout the rest of the decade. Cable television was even more prolific, with an estimated 12 to 15 million subscribers in 1994. Besides Doordarshan, Zee TV — an independent station broadcasting from Mumbai since 1992–uses satellite transmissions. In fact, because Doordarshan is the only network that is permitted to broadcast television signals domestically, Zee TV and other entrepreneurs broadcast their Indian-made videotapes via foreign transmitters.

Other networks joining the fray are Cable News Network (1990); Asia Television Network (1991); Hong Kong-based Star TV (1991); Jain TV, near Bombay (1994); EL TV, a spinoff of Zee TV in Bombay (1994); HTV, an affiliate of the Hindustan Times in New Delhi (1994); and Sun TV, a Tamil language service in Chennai (1994). In a communications breakthrough in July 1995, Doordarshan agreed, for a USUSD 1.5 million annual fee and 50 percent of advertising revenue when it exceeds USUSD 1.5 million, to allow CNN to broadcast twenty-four hours a day via an Indian satellite.

Doordarshan offers national, regional, and local service. The number of television sets increased from around 500,000 in 1976 to 9 million in early 1987 and to around 47 million in 1994; increases are expected to continue at around 6 million sets per year. More than 75 percent of television sets were black and white models in 1992, but the proportion of color sets is increasing annually. Most television sets are produced in India.

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