DD National:Icarus or Phoenix?

Despite being a mid 90’s born ,Doordarshan was pretty popular during my early childhood days in spite of the growing popularity of channels like Sony TV,Star Plus, Zee TV,Sab TV etc in the national circuit and regional channels like Sun TV, Udaya TV, ETV etc during this time. The success of Doordarshan during this period can be attributed to TV shows like Shaktimaan ,Vishnu Puraan ,Shaka Laka Boom Boom,Jasoos Vijay(In collaboration with BBC) etc which kept audiences glued to DD National. DD tasted success during the beginning of this millennium(2000-2001) against its arch rival Star Plus through its sister channel DD Metro and dethroned Star Plus for a brief period of time due to its free to air (FTA) and Pan-Indian presence .During this period,DD Metro aired many genres of TV programmes by collaborating with 9 Gold.It also aired dubbed movies from English and other languages into Hindi during this period. But,this success of DD was short lived as it failed to capitalize its success due to stringent rules ,which did not seem feasible to the production houses. Gradually, they started abandoning Doordarshan and moved towards private channels. Later, in 2003,DD Metro was replaced by DD National.After this period,Doordarshan’s viewership started started declining even in rural areas due to introduction of free to air channels like Star Utsav ,Zee Smile etc.In the case of regional variants of Doordarshan ,the situation was much worser.

Even though, Doordarshan tried reviving its presence by re-branding in 2014,it could taste success only for a few months due to the spike in TRP’s. In 2016,DD did give a try on revival by selling its slots to private production houses like Balaji Telefilms. Unfortunately,GoI did put hold on slot sale policy.The outcome of this hold was , Doordarshan National started airing its already aired programme like Tehreer,Byomkesh Bakshi etc. Till then, Doordarshan’s fate reminded me of the Icarus from the Greek Mythology who got his wings burnt by living in fools paradise. Only two channels from DD tasted success at the end of its period i.e. DD Sports and DD India.The former’s success can be attributed to live streaming of International Cricketing events which was moved from DD National because of the dilemma involving Tata Sky and Star Sports. The success of DD India can be attributed to its re-branding from a general entertainment to a English News Channel in 2017.Since then,it has always(other than few instances) found a place in Top 5 watched English News channel as per BARC ratings.