Private FM radio stations may soon be allowed to air sports commentary, although the ban on news broadcasts by non-government FM channels would take a while to be lifted, information & broadcasting minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi said at the Express Group’s Idea Exchange programme on Wednesday.How generous of our government!
“I will soon go to Parliament with a proposal to allow sports commentary in the private FM radio sector as it is not news,” Dasmunsi said. The Centre is likely to qualify sports commentary as entertainment to make this possible.
I think we need not go as far as China to laugh at or worry about restrictions on information flow, when we have so much here.
Atleast, this is giving a good excuse to quote Bhagwati. He writes in New York Times
China has an authoritarian regime, it cannot fully profit from the information revolution, thus inhibiting the technology that is at the heart of growth today. The PC (personal computer) is incompatible with the C.P. (Communist Party). So India, with its robust and chaotic democracy — what V. S. Naipaul has called a “million mutinies” — has moved dramatically ahead of China in computer technology. Hutton points out that from 1981 to 1995 China had 537 scientists and engineers doing research and development per one million people while India had only 151, and that China had three times as many personal computers as India and a 4-to-1 lead in Internet usage. Yet by 2001, India was producing one-fourth more software, and exporting most of it. “So despite massive investment,” Hutton writes, China “trailed far behind India.” He points out, too, that China damages itself by seeking to control and stifle what its citizens can learn and disseminate. “Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are part of the cultural yeast of globalization,” he says, “yet each has been at the receiving end of China’s Internet firewall of censorship.”
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