In Kerala, the newspaper
habit was noticeable from the 1920`s and entrenched by the 1960`s. The crucial
ingredient was political involvement, especially local politics. Journalists at
Malayala Manorama date the paper's success in establishing a large following in
northern Kerala from 1968 and its brilliant coverage of mob attacks on police stations in the area.36 In 1966, Malayala Manorama had an audited
circulation of 1,64,000; by the first half of 1971 it had reached 3,10,000.
A similar process can be seen
in Andhra Pradesh where owner-editor Ramoji Rao of Eenadu helped to create the
Telugu Desam Party of N T Rama Rao for the state elections of 1982.38 For the
last six months of 1981, Eenadu's average daily circulation was 1,98,000
copies. For the same period a year later it was 2,72,000 copies, a rise of 37
percent. By the end of 1983, it had reached 3,37,000, an increase of 70 per
cent in two years.40 A study of a village in Srikakulam district, the most
northerly and one of the most remote of Andhra Pradesh's districts, found no
newspaper subscribers before the election; but once the campaign began, three
villagers and the panchayat office started subscribing to Eelnadu, brought each
day by high-school students returning from a neighboring town. It was estimated
that a single copy had up to 50 readers. Interviews showed that readers liked
Eenadu because of its detailed coverage of the regional news", especially
about election candidates. The figures of the Registrar of Newspapers support
the suggestion that election excitement over the Telugu Desam Party enhanced
circulations: Telugu daily circulations rose from 4,39,000 in 1981 to 6,30,000
by 1983, an increase of 44 per cent in two years.
The importance of political
involvement also suggests itself ominously when one examines the growth of circulations in Hindi. In the 1980s the most striking aspect of Indian
newspapers has been the expansion of the Hindi daily press. Between 1981 and
1988, Hindi dailies increased their circulations by 75 percent, according to
the Registrar's figures. Hindi dailies audited by the ABC rose by 32 per cent
in that period. More significantly, ABC dailies in Hindi, having reached an
audited circulation of roughly 3.5 million by 1992, had at last outstripped the
circulations of audited English dailies (2.9 million). By 1988, the ratio of
Hindi dailies per 1000 Hindi speakers had risen 50 per cent in eight years and
had reached the low 20s, comparable to Bengali and Tamil figures.
If we measure the checklist
(see above) of requirements of growing newspaper circulations against the
experience of Hindi dailies in 1980-92, there is evidence to support the
proposition that newspaper circulations increase where political interest
increases. In the great Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh( UP), transportation in this period
improved only slightly. However, new technology in printing and communications
al-lowed faster production and distribution of newspapers. The ready
availability of good offset presses has meant that new printing centres can be
started fairly cheaply and easily. The largest selling Hindi daily, Punjab
Kesari of Jalandhar, opened a New
Delhi New Delhi and Lucknow
with plans for a Kanpur
Telephone modems now provide
an efficient way of moving copy. A single news desk in one centre can translate
news-service stories, input them in Devanagari script, format them on computer
and then send them by telephone lines to other printing centres. This decentralization
of printing means that the newspaper reaches distant areas in a short time and
thereby is brought much closer to potential readers. Anecdotal evidence is
telling. A computer scientist from Saharanpur in
western UP told of his surprise to see in the past two or three years that his
father was subscribing to Amar Ujala, publishing from nearby Meerut
Major increases in literacy
rates have yet to occur in the four big Hindi-speaking states where, even by
Indian standards, literacy is low. Against an all-India literacy average of 52
percent of the population over 7 years of age, Bihar stands at 39 per cent,
Madhya Pradesh 44 per cent, Rajasthan 39 per cent and UP 42 per cent. Nevertheless,
these figures themselves represent a literate population of more than 110
million people in 1991.49Takingt he generous figures of the Registrar of
Newspapers, the four states in 1988 circulatedaboutsix million daily news-papers
in all languages,. or a ratio of 55 dailies per thousand literates. This
approaches the Kerala ratio, but in Kerala more than 90 per cent of the
population is literate. Given the large number of readers per newspaper
(usually estimated between six and 12-the figure of 50 noted in the Telugu
survey would be abnormal), this 50:1000 ratio may represent a plateau of
newspaper consumption in a rural society.
In the early 1980s, tens of
thousands of literate Hindi-speakers did not see a daily newspaper. A survey in
1981 found that in Ballia district in the less-developed area of eastern UP,
between half and three-quarters of people never saw a newspaper. Of literate
respondents, 37 per cent said they did not read a newspaper because one was not
conveniently available. Thus the decentralized printing and improved
distribution of the 1980s was able to draw on a large potential audience.
A significant portion of that
audience had more purchasing, power at the end of the 1980s than at the
beginning. Per-capita income in Bihar , Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan and UP was estimated to have grown by 140 per cent between
1980-81 and 1989-90. 2 This is no doubt the roughest of measures, but it
suggests that the price of a newspaper was with in the reach of many more
people in 1990 than it had been in 1980.
Aggressive publishers had an
interest in attracting uncommitted rupees. The families that own Dainik Jagran
(seven centers and circulation of 4,65,000 by 1988)," Aaj (five centers and
3,00,000), and Amar Ujala (five centers and 2,63,000)" have opened 14 new centers since 1979. All three are closely held family enterprises that originated with single-edition dailies founded after independence in Kanpur,
Varanasi and Agra respectively.5 As with proprietorial families elsewhere, they
gauged that to profit and survive their newspapers had to streamline and
expand. Rivals open editions in the headquarter towns of their competitors as
part of a contest for circulation and advertising. In 1993, for example, four
major Hindi dailies were publishing in Kanpur ,
home of Dainik Jagran, and a fifth was importing a special Kanpur
edition from Lucknow
What has driven Hindi
circulations and made such competition seem necessary, though not always
profitable? The answer is bound up with politics and the social excitement
generated in the Hindi-speaking north since the mid-1980s by the controversy at
Ayodhya. In the second half of 1992, which includes the month of Decem-ber when
the mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed by rioters, audited circulation for seven
Aaj editions in UP and Bihar rose by 41,000 copies; for four Amar Ujala
editions, by 25,000; and for four Dainik Jagrant editions, by 18,000. A stirred
population wanted news, and state-controlled electronic media were found
untrustworthy and unsatisfying.
The standard of
coverage-reporting, editing and presentation-of Hindi dailies-since 1990 has
dismayed many observers. Though there is general agreement, even among its
critics, that the Hindi press 'behaved better' in December 1992 than in
November-December 1990 when the previous Ayodhya-related violence occurred, the
performance in 19(X was amazingly irresponsible. The Press Council of India
censured Dainik Jagran and Swantantra
Bharat for their treatment of the
clashes between police and demonstrators at Ayodhya in November 1990. The
newspapers were "guilty of gross irresponsibility and impropriety,
offending the canons of journalistic ethics in promoting mass hysteria on the
basis of rumors and speculation". In one example, a '1' had been inserted
by hand in front of '15' in a casualty headline to inflate the number of dead
to '115'. In another, bars were drawn across the photo of a Hindu religious
leader to give the impression he was in prison. And all four papers were held
to have used wild and unconfirmed headlines.' On December 11 and 13, the Agra edition of Aaj published untrue stories that Hindi
patients were being killed in the hospital
of Aligarh Muslim Kanpur , Varanasi
Does such reporting result
from a lust for circulation or from untrained, partisan journalists? The latter
seems the more important part of an answer. The training and conditions of
Hindi journalists are generally poor. The newsrooms of large Hindi dailies are
often primitive with not even a reference book-much less a library-to be seen.
(This contrasts with dailies like Eenadu, which has an outstanding library in Hyderabad
The effect on circulations of
such ill-founded, spectacular stories is not clear The Hindi daily that appears
to have done best in the second half of 1990 was Amar Ujala, which added 32,000
copies to its July-December sales. It largely escaped the Press Council's
strictures. (It had briefly picked up the Aaj Aligarh story in a late edition,
but killed it later and published a contradiction). Aaj circulations are
difficult to gauge because the paper appears to have been fending off the Audit
Bureau of Circulations at this time; the ABC recorded remarks of not accepted
and under recheck audit for the relevant
periods. The circulations of Dainik Jagran , however, remained relatively stable. It
would be comforting to believe that the least inflammatory newspaper was the
one that most people turned to at a time of upheaval. It is more likely,
how-ever, that Amar Ujala's increases resulted from conditions peculiar to its
regional stronghold in western Uttar Pradesh-per-haps from the fact of its
being the dominant newspaper in the region in which the Aligarh
