THE TELECOM REGULATORY Authority of India has apparently learnt its lessons from the botched attempt two years ago to introduce compulsorily the conditional access system (CAS) for cable television networks in the four metros. Its latest recommendations on how cable networks in cities and major towns should go digital are clearly in the nature of sage advice: Since digital television offers a number of advantages over the analog, there should be a five-year national plan for digitalisation of the networks starting April 2006; yet the plan would be indicative and not mandatory in any form, TRAI has said.

Clearly TRAI has seen the merits of persuasion over compulsion. Given the structure of the cable television industry and its evolution over the past decade and a half, no other approach can be tipped to succeed. The industry had sprouted across the country in virtual illegality; without a licence, no one was allowed then to view television signals from a satellite, let alone capture and redistribute them. Yet, a handful of Indian broadcasters took up space on foreign satellites to beam programming into the country and a myriad small-time entrepreneurs across the country saw the opportunity to carry entertainment into millions of homes bored stiff with content from stodgy Doordarshan. There were no rules; there was no government funding; but there were hungry customers and enthusiastic entrepreneurs, and the industry blossomed. In just about a decade the number of cable homes overtook the number of homes wired with a telephone over a century.

It is no wonder that regulating this business has proved as impossible as dictating orderly growth to a tropical rainforest — the attempt in 2003 to make conditional access system compulsory was derailed in three of the four cities. Yet, the forest is now overgrown and needs room to expand. Many new television channels have surfaced, and the limits have been reached on how many of them the analog transmission method can push through the cable. With its ability to compress up to ten channels in the space of one, digital transmission offers the chance for cable operators to plug in more channels and each of a better technical quality, and for consumers to gain access to channels of their choice.

Digitalisation, of course, requires consumers to invest in reception equipment costing more than Rs 3,000 each, and that is what many of them might balk at. But as long as analog signals also run in parallel with the digital, and consumers have the choice to pick up either, there will be no ground for protest, no opposition of the sort that sabotaged the rollout of CAS two years ago. In its anxiety not to be overbearing, TRAI may have failed to provide any new incentive to either cable operators or consumers to go digital: There are no ideas on reducing the cost of the digital boxes for consumers, and asking cable operators switching to digital to put up a bank guarantee of up to Rs 50 lakh could well deter entrants when the need is for pulling out all the impediments to competition. For all that, TRAI may well be surprised by the response it gets.

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