Rotting Foodgrains and TRP Led Debates

Rotting Foodgrains and TRP Led Debates

Of late, I watch most news channels (both English & Regional Language Channels) more for entertainment than for news. The more serious the subject, the more comical the discussions tend to be.

Many debates leave me with varied emotions ranging from fury to laughter at the lack of depth, lack of knowledge, lack of perspective displayed by anchors as well as the so-called and/or self-proclaimed experts.

Today I was watching a few debates on the issue of Rotting Foodgrains and the Supreme Court's order / observation on the same.

Across a whole range of TV channels, without exception, the discussions were meandering around pet themes of the individual concerned rather than the core issue.

• The anchors were focussing on trying to create "a lively debate" with an eye on TRPs
• The left-leaning thinkers / experts were asking the government to "Give away" the foodgrains
• The right-leaning thinkers / experts were demanding privatisation of storage systems
• The politicians were busy finding fault with the rest of the gang
• Anyone who was remotely sensible was either shouted down or was not given adequate time to even give a coherent expression of his/her thoughts on the matter
• All this was interspersed with the usual quota of commercial breaks, making the point about TRPs abundantly clear.

Despite shifting across the whole range of TV channels, I was unable to fathom as to why specific debates / discussions dedicated to each of the following aspects were not being deliberated upon for any meaningful length of time:

• Meaningful postmortem of what happened and why the foodgrains were rotting in the first place
• An "Immediate" Action Plan on what ought to be done "Right away" within the next 2-3 days
• An "Intermediate" Action Plan on meaningful steps that need to be taken within the next 4-6 weeks to solve the problem of rotting foodgrains for the current season without any significant adverse side effects.
• An "In-depth" discussion on a lasting solution taking into account all aspects of the problem, including systemic changes, changes for the processes of procurement / transportation / storage / distribution, exploring private-public partnerships, etc., keeping in mind all the stakeholders involved, ranging from landless farmers to end-consumers

Let me see if at least tomorrow's newspapers have any in-depth analysis of the above!

Regards,

N

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