Media not focussing on farm breakthroughs, says Swaminathan

New Delhi, Nov 6 : Eminent agricultural scientist and Rajya Sabha member Dr M S Swaminathan today rued the fact that the national media had veered away from its role as champion of the 'green revolution symphony' and other agricultural breakthroughs, which it had played in the 1960s.

Now, the media only threw the spotlight on agriculture when there were tragic incidents such as farmer suicides, droughts and floods, he said at a workshop on "Parliament and the Media".

The kind of media support for new scientific discoveries happening in agricultural laboratories and as seen in the 1960s was not coming today, he regretted.

Though farm productivity was abysmally low in the country, Dr Swaminathan, known as father of the green revolution in India, opined that compared to China, India stood on the threshold of greater agricultural productivity due to the host of measures being taken.

Former Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Chairman M Damodaran, in his address, called for having healthy and robust processes in place to protect investors. While a code of conduct was necessary among business journalists, this was proving difficult to achieve, he added.

On the conscious shift from news as news to news as commodity, the former UTI Chairman admitted discomfort with this growing trend of paid advertisements masquerading as news being used by those with business interests.

He warned that attempts to manipulate the market by those with vested interests would leave the average investor cynical and drive away the very people the market wanted to bring in.

As the power of the media had increased, credibility had taken a knock. Commerce had overtaken content resulting in readers finding it difficult to distinguish the exact nature of the contents, he said.

Mr Nilotpal Basu, senior Rajya Sabha MP, noted that media coverage of Parliamentary proceedings was tapering. "Sensationalism gets disproportionate premium," he said, adding that media had an important role to play along with the legislature in keeping the government accountable to the people.

Regarding the demand to throw open the committee proceedings to media scrutiny, the Parliamentarian was not in favour of the proposal as it would affect the committee's functioning. "The kind of bipartisan unanimity seen in the committees will go out and will be well-nigh impossible to achieve this besides becoming a replica of the two Houses," he added.

--UNI

(c) 2009 Published with permission from United News of India.
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