India: Multiple Media Explosions

This chapter maps the media structure that has received the least international academic attention among the world’s prominent media systems – India – and provides a conceptual map of its features, developments and influences. It begins with a short history of Indian media, traces its roots in colonial India and during the Indian freedom struggle, and goes on to evaluate the impact of the rapid expansion of media since the economic liberalisation of the 1990s. It examines the newspaper market, which has grown to overtake China as the largest in the world, as well as the proliferation of hundreds of television channels and radio stations in the last two decades. Reasons for the high rate of growth of mobile telephony, with more than 850 million subscribers in 2013, and the slow growth of online media are also highlighted. Aspects and issues ranging from policy and regulatory environment to ownership, competition and the effect of market forces on the culture of media are studied and analysed. The chapter also conducts a layered analysis of the role of various media in society, social movements and India’s democracy from the national to the local levels in the light of the historical development of the media. Finally, the chapter challenges the practicality of characterising India’s multilingual, multi-layered and continent-sized media as one ‘national media system’ and proposes considering Indian media as a network of interrelated but substantially independent media systems