The little brown transistor on the kitchen table was the first thing Bindu reached out for in the mornings. Malayalam songs would begin playing at 6.55 am and go on for an hour, broken only by a couple of three minute news bulletins when the clock struck 7 and 8. One July morning, all of it abruptly stopped. She knew what was happening. It was in the papers. Ananthapuri FM, her beloved radio channel, would stop its broadcast and instead be merged with the Akashvani AM – the other channel run by the All India Radio, dedicated to hard news and discussions.
Ananthapuri was made of lighter content – music and entertainment for the most part – for listeners like Bindu, a resident of Thiruvananthapuram. The station has been running profitably well for years, on FM. In July, the Union government took a call to move everything to FM and in that process got the Akashvani, running on medium wave, merged with Ananthapuri. Having to accommodate all the news programmes of Akashvani meant that a lot of Ananthapuri’s music and entertainment content had to go. It also meant job loss to many casual employees. Kozhikode’s FM channel – Real FM – is also going through a similar process.
“Small changes began at the start of the New Year when suddenly more Hindi programmes began to be broadcasted. After a lot of protest and intervention of state leaders, this had changed. Even so the news bulletins started coming in Hindi and even Sanskrit, and sometimes in English. Even the Malayalam news would have little content from Kerala,” Bindu complains.
Having been a dedicated listener since she was a girl in the 70s she knows the list of programmes by heart. For generations of music lovers, the radio was the only means of listening to the film songs they loved. Many of them stuck to the device even when television conquered the living rooms and the internet slipped into people’s lives. Curiously enough, the younger lot, spoiled by choice, too tuned into the radio when in the 2000s, there was a proliferation of FM channels, private and public.
“It was not just music but literary discussions, radio dramas, and so much else. The Ganopaharam in the morning was a special programme that ran from Monday to Saturday every week, playing songs of a different decade each day. Then there was Nisha Surabhi in the night, with uninterrupted songs,” says a listener who goes to sleep with the radio on.
Groups of listeners have been protesting outside the AIR office in Thiruvananthapuram, asking to bring back Ananthapuri FM.
MLA VK Prasanth speaks at a protest of listeners outside AIR, Thiruvananthapuram
Interestingly, the channel alone makes more than 1.5 crore rupees in revenue every year, and could easily afford a separate FM transmitter, says a source. They had been requesting for a second transmitter for a long time, a practice followed by other major cities in India such as Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and even Kochi. However, this was not granted.
With the merger, the prime time slots – between 6 and 9 in the evening – have all been affected, with extensive news programmes replacing the original light-hearted content that listeners preferred.
“This has been implemented as part of Directorate General Akashvani's directions to carry public service broadcasts of primary channels hitherto aired on Medium Wave AM frequencies on FM mode across India,” says Head of Programmes, Akashvani Thiruvananthapuram, V Sivakumar.
Apart from affecting numerous listeners, the merger also caused job loss. The AIR employed many part-timers – more than a hundred every month – each of whom would anchor five to six programmes in the month. For a lot of people, this was an important source of income and for some, the only one. Many of the part-timers have been women, single parents among them. Without enough programmes to do, their turns reduced drastically, causing their incomes to come down to one tenth of what it was.
AIR, Thiruvananthapuram
In a letter to Anurag Thakur, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Thiruvananthapuram's MP Shashi Tharoor pointed out the difficulties – "financial and emotional turmoil" – for the casual staff workers. The Congress leader also spoke of the 4.5 million loyal listeners who have been affected.
Politicians of all parties intervened. Rajya Sabha member of the CPI(M) and journalist from Kerala, John Brittas wrote a scathing letter to Thakur, calling the merger "an outright destruction of the identity of Malayalam FMs". It has transpired at the expense of regional Malayalam programmes and the livelihoods of dedicated casual staff members, he wrote. He also brought up the issue of the Real FM Kozhikode facing a similar fate. Earlier, he had raised the issue of renaming Ananthapuri as Vividh Bharathi Malayalam, and replacing Malayalam content with Hindi. A move that was thwarted by the intervention of many politicians taking up the listeners' interest.
The BJP’s Union Minister of State for External Affairs, V Muraleedharan, also met Anurag Thakur with a request to not stop running Ananthapuri FM. He too quoted the 4.5 million listeners from Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam and Pathanamthitta who would be affected. “Beyond an entertainment medium, the channel that nurtures the Malayalam language and culture is inextricably linked with the lives of people of the capital,” he said.
Musicians of the state also joined the cause, releasing small video bytes with requests to retain the channel. Singers Krishnachandran and Biju Narayanan, musicians Sharreth and Stephen Devassy spoke about the loss of Ananthapuri FM as saddening to artistes, and urged the decision-makers to bring back the channel.