Agriculture in media: Stay tuned!

Would you believe if I tell you Amitabh Bachhan has recently become the Brand Ambassador of an Indian television channel for free? I am sure you might be wondering about all the possible big names offering traditional entertainment programmes or, maybe, about the Sony Television which broadcasted his famous popular show "Kaun Baunega Crorepoti", the Indian version of "Who wants to be a millionaire". Wrong! Now even farmers in India often start their day watching their favourite actor who is inviting them to build a better India through media. DD Kisan, a 24/7 Indian agriculture programme, owned by Durdarshan was launched on May 26, 2015 that solely focused on assisting farmers by providing real-time inputs on farming techniques, water conversations and other agriculture-related topics. The need and power of broadcast media evidently shone in a country like India where a significant contribution of 17.9 per cent (Planning Commission, Government of India, 2014) to GDP (gross domestic product) comes from agriculture. In a country of 140 million farming households the TRP (television rating point) of this channel shot up from 0.68 million in the 1st week to 5.0 million in the 4th week of broadcasting. Now this leads us to a country where the agriculture sector employs 47.4 per cent of the total labour force (Labour Force Report 2010, Bangladesh). This sets the platform for shedding spotlight on the present scenario and potential of Bangladesh's agriculture in media.
Bangladesh has recently seen a faster transition of the media industry than any time before. There are currently 27 public and private tv channels, 14 community radios, 9 commercial radios and 21 major newspapers in Bangladesh to disseminate information of all kinds. Out of these 27 channels, currently 8 regular agriculture programmes are getting broadcasted on 7 television channels to cater to the information demand of rural farmers. The picture might look grim compared to India, but the evolution that took place in television media has the tremendous amount of potentials in the pipeline. The impeccable need of agriculture programmes in broadcast media has always been prioritised in an agrarian country like Bangladesh. 'Mati O Manush'- the first ever agriculture television programme in the history of Bangladesh, was one of the flagship programme that brought people of all ages, of urban and rural genre, in front of television sets. That spellbound feature, content and diversity might not attract the current audience as before, but certainly it induced many trendsetters to be commensurate with the previous benchmarks. Additionally, the emergence of cable TV didn't only diverse the portfolio of the industry in terms of agriculture programme format but herald a new era of building an agriculture utopia. According to National Media and Demographic Survey (NMDS) 2013, Bangladesh embraced a significant increase of 74 per cent in cable TV penetration from 2005 to 2013 and the number is still growing. Hence this evolution yielded some additional agriculture programmes in the portfolio of Bangladesh's media industry. "Hridoye Mati o Manush" of Channel I , "Shyamol Bangla" of Bangla Vision, "Shobuj Bangla" of Gazi TV and "Krishijog" of Ekattor are some agriculture-based programmes that farmers refer to heavily when it comes to information related to agriculture. The accentuating gesture of keeping agriculture programmes even in the new channel's portfolio brings new prospects and positivity towards agriculture programmes, which is a prerequisite to enhance the agriculture programmes. For example, a new channel, Jamuna TV, launched in April 2014 started broadcasting an agriculture programme named as Bisleshon" from the very beginning.
The immense potential of using the power of media is often ignored in the context of Bangladesh's agriculture. Most of the trendsetting agriculture programmes were guided by passion, dedication and personal interest of some prominent journalists who took agriculture journalism to a new level. But the institutionalisation format to nurture agriculture journalism has always been the missing block. The Department of TV and Film Studies at the University of Dhaka is designing an agriculture journalism course, which will be launched in 2017. No wonder this form of journalism involves a certain level of field-savvy, but some basic knowledge involving historical, geographical, economic and reporting aspects offered through this designed course will make the journalists repugnant about both agriculture and journalism. A greater understanding at the threshold level would evolve a pool of inspired journalists, who will reflect the potential and constraint of agriculture succinctly in future.
It is often argued that viewership of these agriculture programmes are not the most shining one to invest more. A simple understanding on the population distribution will help this stalemate situation of viewership. Currently, 66 per cent (World Bank, 2014) of population is residing in the rural part of Bangladesh. A good portion of the human resource is directly or indirectly engaged in agriculture industry. Thus, dedicated programmes reflecting a specific genre, agriculture, are expected to have a good extent of acceptance and viewership. An internal study conducted by Katalyst, a market development project, on 2000 farmers show that 56 per cent farmers watch agriculture programmes. Since Television Rating Point (TRP) has always been a key indicator of viewership, advertisers were formidably looking out for the data. Previously, the meters installed only in urban areas obviously are understating the real viewership of Bangladesh, since it excluded rural audiences who are mostly the viewers of agriculture programmes. This spurious conundrum is about to end, since MRB Bangladesh, the only service provider of daily TV viewership data, has recently partnered with Katalyst and installed TRP meters in rural areas of Bangladesh. Thus, different market players like agriculture input companies and FMCGs now can also use rural viewership data to formulate their business and promotion strategies.
Breaking the status quo and coming up with new ideas involve a series of work continued by different stakeholders. Government agencies to television channels to academics, policymakers and even farmers need to work hand in hand to make the possible change that will benefit farmers and thus people of Bangladesh. Having the set vision of building a Digital Bangladesh, the last and most foolish thing to do would be keeping broadcast media away from agriculture. The enormous power and contribution of agriculture and media need to be utilised to crown our Bangladesh as one of the developed countries, as we dream of.
To do so, stay tuned!
The author works as Business Consultant in Information Channel Sector of Katalyst.
Email- [email protected]