Entertainment - Why a Bhojpuri TV channel was long overdue

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

In the fuss over Colors, everyone seems to have missed Mahua which is India’s first general entertainment channel in Bhojpuri.

India’s first Bhojpuri general entertainment channel or GEC was launched in August this year. Mahua comes from a relatively unknown company, Century Communication. The group which claims to be a Rs 400-crore one, owns production and post-production studios (Pixion), makes ad films, owns 9 radio frequencies and even sells airtime for channels. P K Tewari, the chairman and managing director of the group reckons it will break even on the Rs 75 crore spent on the channel in a year. A movie and music channel is due before the end of the year to make the Bhojpuri offering somewhat complete. Tewari has over the years been acquiring Bhojpuri films and claims to have a library with about 200 films, which has cost just about Rs 20 crore. Maybe a news channel could be on its way too, though he doesn’t commit on that.

The need for Mahua and its offshoots has been there but never acknowledged. There are 240 million Bhojpuri-speaking people in India. But so far there wasn’t a single channel for them, even as there are more than a dozen channels for 63 million Tamil-speaking people or half a dozen for 70 million Bangla-speaking ones. The reasons were obvious — the part of the country where a majority of the Bhojpuri speaking people reside (Bihar and parts of Uttar Pradesh) are the most difficult to map. In fact TAM Media Research, which monitors TV viewership, does not cover Bihar, so there was no way to measure the audience and therefore getting advertising is a problem. (The upside is that this makes it a great radio market.) Besides Hindi substituted very easily for this audience, just like it does for Gujarati-speaking people. In fact a chunk of Hindi GEC viewership comes from this audience, so splitting this audience further made little sense for mainstream broadcasters.

So everybody ignored this obvious gap in the market till the overwhelming popularity of Bhojpuri cinema made it impossible to do that. Mesmerised by the Rs 150 per ticket audience, across languages, film companies have been so busy catering to the upper-end of the audience only. As a result the entire mass market, where people like to watch mass-market Hindi or Tamil or Telugu films was ignored. This led to a huge resurgence in several dormant regional cinemas, which started coming up to fill the gap — most notably Bangla and Bhojpuri.

One my students at the Mudra Institute of Communication Ahmedabad (MICA), Kumud Shankar did his dissertation on Bhojpuri cinema and the paper revealed that in 2007, 76 Bhojpuri films were released, a 100 per cent increase over the previous year. As Bollywood got more corporatised, many of the small-time financiers and producers moved towards Bhojpuri with films costing just about Rs 45 lakh-Rs 1 crore to make. Both distributors and retailers (theatre owners) were happy to show these rather than old releases or pornographic films.

As the eco-system built up, so did the profits. On an average, Bhojpuri films bring back ten times their cost to the producer. Now even multiplex chains such as Reliance Adlabs and PVR play Bhojpuri films at some of their metro screens. Rough estimates puts the total box-office gross of Bhojpuri films at over Rs 300 crore in 2007. The next logical move was for Bhojpuri to shift to the small screen.

So far it looks like Mahua will make it. Anil Mishra, CEO, Integrid Media, the company that runs Mahua for Century, says the number of advertisers has gone up from 9 in August to 32 in October this year. (No revenue figures were shared.) The only other competition Mahua has is ETV UP and Sahara UP. “If you take UP, which TAM monitors, then in August we were at 2 GRPs (gross rating points), now we are at 30 GRPs. Remember these are not Bhojpuri- speaking areas. We are only in one part of UP and are doing very well there,” says he. In the same market, Sahara is at 86 GRPs while ETV UP is at 11 GRPs, says Mishra. He claims that the channel is available everywhere on the S-band. The viewership in Bihar is picking up on sheer word-of-mouth and through promotional activities on the ground, he says. Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, all states with a significant Bhojpuri-speaking population also show up on the TAM charts.

While the beginning looks promising, six weeks data is too small a sample he points out. Also going by Tamil, Marathi or other successful language genres, while the first mover has a huge advantage, it also takes a long time for it to settle down to a dominating position.

The potential however stretches way beyond India. Just like Hindi, Bhojpuri works across various parts of Europe and Asia where second and third generation migrants still speak the language. The Netherlands, for example, has one of the biggest concentrations of Bhojpuri-speaking people in its Surinamese minority. This gives low-cost Bhojpuri films another market to target. Just like Sun TV found a market in the US with the Tamil-speaking diaspora and Zee did it in the UK with the Hindi-speaking one, nothing stops Mahua from looking for dollar-paying subscribers in the foreign markets. That will hasten its journey towards profitability and perhaps prove a point or two to metro-centric investors.