It is not even a state secret; Nepal has the worst television in all South Asia. Nepal Television (NTV), the state-owned broadcasting monopoly doles out such stale fare that, other than a couple of humour shows, its two most popular programmes are Pakistani serials on Tuesday evenings and Hindi films on Saturday afternoons.
If it is true that the only way to counter the satellite invasion is by producing as good if not better programmes than are beamed down, then NTV can provide the best advice on how to avoid that responsibility. For NTVs news is without spine, its tele-dramas hark back to the early days of melodramatic theatre, and a feudal mentality keeps good producers alienated and off the air.
The result is that the Nepali audience has abandoned Nepal Television as hopeless. The odd minister probably still watches to see himself garlanding some statue or other, but the public is elsewhere, tuning into Doordarshan, or Zee, or even PTV. Five years after the satellite invasion, every middle class Kathmandu household is hooked to one or more of the numerous satellite channels.
NTV, which once enjoyed near-total monopoly, has been relegated to the status of a minor player in its own country. Despite a decade in existence, the stations revenue is stagnant at NPR 4 crores per annum, and it is on for less than 7 hours a day. As long as NTVs programming remains so embarrassingly bad, it does not make sense even to debate such hefty societal issues as electronic cultural invasion (from India, Pakistan or the West).