The present state of affairs in household television access cannot continue for ever. At present a household pays a flat monthly fee to a cable operator and secures access to a clutch of channels, upwards of 45 channels. There is no segmentation of the market, hence no differential pricing of products. You pay the same amount for a boring channel as you would for an educative or entertaining one. The line between public service broadcasting and private commercial broadcasting has also been blurred. The decision to segment the market through a conditional access system (CAS) is a step towards the rationalisation of TV access and viewership.Those who object to CAS may be right in doing so on the grounds that the technology may become obsolete or on the grounds that a big bang transition is not physically possible in a short span of time. However, they are wrong in objecting to the very principle of CAS and pay TV. As in so many other policies, this government has so far handled the issue in a ham-handed way inviting criticism and near panic, and the Opposition has cleverly used this to its advantage. However, in criticising the manner in which the policy is being handled, the Opposition would be wrong to criticise the idea itself.One of the consequences of the ill-planned policy change is the fact that the government has had to sharply bring down the import duty on set top boxes required for CAS. While this may be viewed as a consumer-friendly gesture, what was the economic logic behind it? Someone may well question the rationale of alternative duty structures on alternate products and ask why set top boxes must bear such a low duty burden. Moreover, the domestic industry has complained that if more time had been given to it, it would have been able to come up with locally manufactured set top boxes. Surprisingly, groups like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch have not reacted to this issue. Should 6 million set top boxes be imported in a short period of time, or should domestic manufacturers be encouraged by being given more time? While these are issues for policy makers to resolve, the viewer must accept the logic of pay TV and of paying differentially for different channels.
