Overview

In recent months In India, the print media has been very much in the public eye, certainty on the government's mind and somewhat untypically, a subject of serious political and intellectual debate. It would be no exaggeration to say that the quality of relations between India's unevenly developed pluralistic and high aspiring press and its personalized overcentralised and apparently besieged government is widely perceived as tense, troubled and even truculent. This perception runs in the face of the fact that the press is hardly of one mind and one voice when it deals with the government and society and takes up issues of general relevance. The apparent surprise in the Indian media context is that, institutionally speaking, the press is acting very much like a player in the major league socio-political arena despite the wellknown physical limitations, in terms of weight and reach that apply to it. In sustained qualitative and historical terms, the Indian press enjoys a politisal, legal and institutional space and a degree of practised independence of freedom that makes its experience very nearly unique in the developing world. The question of coverage and reach in a country of gigantic proportions, including the second largest population in the world, is a troubling one. Yet considering the scale of illiteracy and the denial of basic education that exist in India, the reach of the press, its actual coverage and influence, is not at all inconsiderable According to data available with the Registrar of Newspapers for India, the circulation of all newspapers in 2010 in the region of 68 million and the circulation of daily newspapers was over 37.2% million. And the growth rates for the five year period, for different sections of the press were quite encouraging A feature of this progress was the quite buoyant performance of newspapers published in Indian languages, in particular Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil and Kanada. The issues that the Indian press has taken up and helped shape, through its actively pluralistic coverage, over the long term do add up to some kind of agenda setting at the national level. The issues have ranged from India's independence from the fetters of colonial rule to social reform, national security, relations with neighbors and corruption to the basic interests of the people vis-à-vis problems such as hunger, landlessness and exploitation. Naturally, the Indian press, track record on such issues has been variable, but on the whole it is a serious and creditable track record that can hold its own against any other major independent press tradition.

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