Sushma's men are watching a lot of F-TV

Sushma's men are watching a lot of F-TV
Anuradha Raman

New Delhi, January 13: Guess what's high on the I&B Ministry's list these days. Fashion Television, the 24-hr free-to-air channel, where one ramp blurs into another, where models, from all over the world, show what they are wearing and sometimes what they are not.

Forget PTV propaganda, or for that matter news programmes in French, Chinese and other foreign languages, officials at the Central Monitoring Cell in Aya Nagar are obsessed with Minister Sushma Swaraj's latest obsession.

But there's a problem: at their office, they don't get F-TV. So every day, a ``casual monitor'' (read reviewer) and an engineer go all the way to a cable operator in Kishangarh, near Vasant Kunj, to watch F-TV, to find out if Armani's winter collection violates ``Indian culture and ethos.'' Because the Minister has said that if it does, she will refer the matter to a panel of parliamentarians.

Every evening, the reviewer and the engineer return after recording all F-TV programmes.

Not that it's all fun. The monitoring cell has its own problems. Set up in the '30s to keep a watch on propaganda programmes beamed from across the border, unit members are peeved that their job has been so trivialised. The unit faces an acute shortage of staff as more than 90 per cent of the posts are vacant. The I&B Ministry, under which the monitoring service falls, has not filled up the posts for quite some time now. ``Out of the 39 posts for Indian languages only four are occupied and out of 29 posts in foreign languages only two have been filled up,'' officials said.

Kashmir language bullettins are not being monitored for want of trained staff. Out of the foreign languages, only Tibetan and Arabic channels are being monitored.

For want of trained staff, the unit has often solicited the services of students from Jawarharlal Nehru University specialising in foreign languages who are paid Rs 25 every day for the five-hour job they are not qualified for.