Jawhar Sircar has been a bureaucrat all his life. But the 63-year-old CEO of the Prasar Bharati Corporation, India’s state-controlled TV and radio broadcaster, believes “the bureaucracy is obsessed with increasing their numbers like rabbits and scrawling illegible notes”.

One part of this observation comes from almost 40 years in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), which populates the bureaucracy.

The other comes from trying to change things at Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR), the two arms of the US$246-million Prasar Bharati. Some of the big changes that would improve the quality and the efficiency at the 414 radio stations and 33 TV channels have been tough to push through.

About half of Sircar’s time in the bureaucracy has been spent in finance/commerce or education, culture and media. He has won awards and recognition for reviving museums or getting the Kolkata Book fair off the ground, among other things.

What stands out in his mind is his time as culture secretary from 2008 to 2012. “Culture is more complex than just song and dance or IHC (India Habitat Centre, a sort of hub for the arts in Delhi), especially in a nation where the tectonic plates are not settled. India’s diversity is playing itself out through culture,” he says.

His understanding of and empathy for culture, media and the arts is what probably led to his being handpicked for the job of running Prasar Bharati in 2012.

India’s public service broadcaster is one of the most asset-rich media firms in the US$7.5-billion television industry. It is, however, a bundle of problems. Technically it is autonomous. But Prasar Bharati cannot hire or fire people or leverage its assets to raise money without the approval of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. That is because it doesn’t own its assets – 1,400 transmission towers, spectrum and real estate. These were never transferred to the corporation after legislation creating the body was passed 1997. The result is that Prasar Bharati lives on a government dole – either as budgetary support (US$382 million in 2013-14) or as advertising.

When there was no competition, much of this did not matter. But as private television took off in India from the mid-1990s, Doordarshan has lost heavily. It now employs a staggering 31,621 people churning out television that not too many of India’s 800 million+ TV viewers watch.

Over the last decade or so, four committees that studied the broadcaster have said, roughly, the same thing – delink it administratively and financially from the government. Irrespective of ideology, most political parties in power have ignored this advice.

This leaves the CEO of the corporation with very little elbow room. There has been some progress, though, under Sircar. Last year it signed on with Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s public service broadcaster, for the distribution of Doordarshan channels in about 120 million homes across Europe, Central Asia and the Arab world of West Asia and North Africa.

Doordarshan is now on social media, its officers use e-mail and the whole discourse around technology within the corporation is changing.

“There were massive vested interests in investing more in terrestrial without checking how many terrestrial antennae are left,” Sircar says.

There are currently only 10 million ‘only’ Doordarshan homes that have a terrestrial antennae. Nevertheless, DD services are available in all of India’s 161 million TV homes because of must-carry rules that force all cable and DTH operators to carry Doordarshan channels.

What Prasar Bharati needs to explore seriously is the prospect of better reach and revenues with its free DTH service, Freedish.

Freedish has an estimated 20 million homes, which makes it India’s largest DTH operator. Yet, for more than two years now, Sircar has been unable to increase the channel offering from 59 to 100. Neither has he been able to encrypt the service. Then there have been hirings, in which the Ministry did not involve him.

Sircar is philosophical about much of this. “I have reached a state of equilibrium. I have realised that I cannot be the only autonomist around while 30,000 people (Prasar Bharati employees) are screaming ‘we don’t want autonomy.’” -Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

ContentAsia’s regular interview talks to people doing big and bigger things to move the industry forward. This interview was published in ContentAsia eNewsletter, 29 June 2015