Of late, the newspapers in Britain have been running stories on the triumph of the BBC; the monarch of all it surveys, both in terms of revenues and viewership. It has hewn out a position that other public service broadcasters would sell their grandmothers to have; quite simply the monarch of the airwaves, not just bigger and richer than others, but actually setting trends in programming.Over the years, after wallowing in a morass of procedures and stale ideas, it has emerged as the new broadcasting giant - earning over £ 24 billion, and fastening on to an audience-share the size of which must make the competition weep with frustrated rage. Presiding over this triumph is the director general, Greg Dyke - a manager of men, a shrewd analyst of the market, and a man who determines what he wants and then sets about ruthlessly getting it. Recently a select committee of the house of commons very stuffily pointed to the large amount he was earning, and the fat bonus and other allowances he got last year. More than the prime minister, they said with indignation. Well, of course he earns more than the prime minister; he is, after all, a man who has the kind of job that chief executive officers all over London have, and compared to CEOs who control empires as big and lucrative as the BBC, he earns far less. Comparing his salary with Tony Blair's is neither here nor there. What is much more relevant is that Dyke is basically a manager of men; not a programme man drawn from the depths of the BBC's vast network, but someone who has been known for his professional acuity for a fairly long time. True, he was a BBC man for a number of years, but he remains what he basically was. One does not know enough of the man and the way he worked to analyse the reasons for his being able to put the BBC where it is today; all one can do, as a foreign watcher in the United Kingdom for a short time is to look at what evidence there is. That evidence is in the programmes broadcast on the BBC channels, and the nature of the channels themselves. Radio has, apart from BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, the relatively recent BBC 4, although this has been around for long enough for it to be pretty much a part of the radio scene. But it has taken a great deal of listeners away and not by an act of cannibalization, that is, from the BBC's own channels. The more dramatic change has been, inevitably, in BBC television. There is, apart from channels One and Two, BBC Choice and BBC 24; apart, of course, from what we can see in India, BBC World, which is not visible in the UK. A look at the content of the channels, and the positioning of programmes through the day speaks of the careful planning of channel content. Entertainment shades into information, and back into entertainment; entertainment itself switches from game-shows and quizzes to serials and films; and within each genre there are different kinds carefully spaced. For example, there may be a more cerebral quiz placed at one time (usually later in the day) and the more relaxed ones like Wipeout earlier, keeping a close eye on the changing nature of the audience. This is just one aspect of the programmes. The one factor that informs all of them is the quality. It's not as if all of them are superbly made; but then, they don't have to be. What they are, though, is interesting. To be sure, they look as if a lot of money has been spent on them, and it must have been, on a scale we would find mind-boggling. But good programmes do not come cheap; that is a principle which has been underscored by the survey done a few years ago by McKinsey on public service broadcasters. And set that against the revenues earned, and see if it isn't worth the expense. And then there is the news. Free from political interference, not acting as a mouthpiece for the government, even though it does observe certain formal requirements or norms, such as covering the Queen's golden jubilee in more detail and more extensively than a commercial channel would. But they can and do carry stories which are critical, often sharply so, of government decisions or actions, and even though their civil servants and ministers may rage inwardly, they take care not to show it. This, one can say, is a unique feature of the BBC but let's be very clear about one thing - the news is by no means all there is to the BBC. In fact, the news is a rather small part of the day's programmes, contrary to popular belief at home that the BBC is a news channel. The other element is one that from the outside one can only guess at, but the evidence provided by their efforts and work, visible and audible, literally to all audiences is there. This is the kind of people who are attracted to the BBC. They are intelligent, imaginative people, who clearly have a working atmosphere which lets them try out new ideas, even though not all of them may get to be aired. And Dyke is casting his net wide, looking at the ethnic minorities for new, fresh talent, because, as he says, the BBC is 'hideously white'. He has, very shrewdly, focused on personnel; people are what any good organization is about, people with the attributes that take it forward and build it, if necessary, by breaking old modes and casts. The fact that he worked out how to get such people is borne out by the success of the organization in the fiercely competitive world of broadcasting. There was a time, when John Major was prime minister, when the future of the BBC seemed to be in doubt. The renewal of its Royal Charter, which gave it the licence fees from all television and radio sets in the UK, was beset with arguments that, since other channels were also being watched, the fees should be divided between the BBC and other channels. In the event, the charter was renewed, and the BBC given the fees in full. But there were, for the organization, anxious moments. This time not only was there no argument about the renewal of the charter, there was also a slightly over-the-top declaration from the culture minister that this would be the pattern for the next 10 to 15 years, because the BBC has become a 'much loved' institution of the British people. So all right, let's ask the inevitable question. How does all this affect our very own Prasar Bharati? Well, let's begin by saying that one has outlined the triumphal emergence of the BBC as the biggest and most influential of broadcasters in the UK, not to turn immediately to sneer at Prasar Bharati. Not at all. There is much that is of value in our own broadcast organization, in terms of talented people; besides, the much talked of reach of Prasar Bharati is a reality that can be utilized to great effect. Unfortunately media attention is focused myopically on just one aspect of broadcasting - the news. The fact is that the news bulletins of Prasar Bharati contain the same stories as those broadcast by private channels, and are printed on front pages by most newspapers on the following day. But the media says that Prasar Bharati news is biased, and most of what they say sticks, whether it's true or not. Yes, the government does - through the ministry of information and broadcasting, through the prime minister's office, and other means - sometimes tell Prasar Bharati to carry a particular news item in a particular form, which Prasar Bharati does. This is disgraceful, because then the government lies about not ever having done anything like that. But this is something that will stop when Prasar Bharati stops going to the government for handouts. Right now it needs Rs 800 crore a year, or perhaps more, just to keep going; it has no money to do anything except to just about keep going. If some means were to be found to make Prasar Bharati independent of the government in terms of resources, then the real battle will commence over the independence of the news division. But as long as the government pays Prasar Bharati to keep going, this is never going to happen. Right from the time the BBC started operations in 1927, it has been funded by the licence fees gathered by the post office for it. That kept it independent of the government, and yet linked in an indirect way. In our turbulent society, the only way Prasar Bharati can distance itself is by becoming financially independent. If it finds such a way, and it can persuade the government to accept it, the initial step will have been taken, not just for the news division's independence - that is only a part of the broadcasting Prasar Bharati does - but also for funding the production of good programmes. For public service broadcasting in India, this will be as revolutionary as the invention of the wheel.