Prasar Bharti CEO Recalls How People Ridiculed The Decision Of 'Ramayan' Re-Run Initially!

Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati is a happy man as Ramayan broke several records to become one of the most-watched TV shows in history.

Doordarshan's fate changed after the re-run. A channel that was casually touted as an 'obsolete' channel went on to garner 250 million views.

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But what is this journey an easy one? Interestingly, he recalls that his WhatsApp groups rang with laughter when the news of the show hit the headlines.

"They're all, like, laughing. Who's going to watch it?! I had to tell them that, you know, India is very different. It's not just the English speaking elite, it's much bigger, much more diverse. So there was that worry," Vempati spoke to IANS and revealed the actual backstory of Prasar Bharati's programming during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The show was telecast soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered the first lockdown in late March. After the re-run began, Doordarshan's reach soared way past the top seven Hindi general entertainment channels.

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Time spent on Doordarshan moved from 15 minutes per week to more than 70 minutes. The re-run on April 16, 2020 alone logged 77 million viewers.

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"It was crazy," Vempati said, detailing the nuts and bolts of sourcing the Ramayan from the Ramanand Sagar family in Mumbai.

So how did they finally manage to access the tapes? There is an interesting story that Vempati shared.

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"The tapes were in the deep archive of the (Ramanand) Sagar family, and in Mumbai it was like operating in curfew. Someone had to physically retrieve these things. The formats had changed. People had to work through the night to figure out how to get it into a compatible format, and then push it from Bombay. Because the file sizes are so large, you can't do it over the internet, it would have taken forever. So we had a satellite-based mechanism by which the content was beamed from Bombay and downloaded into servers here so that the next day's episodes could be aired."

He said that "The combination of lockdown and 'Ramayan' showed us that families can still come together around television if the content is wholesome and appeals to every segment. Nostalgia was always a trend for Doordarshan. While we leverage nostalgia, we can't rely on that alone".

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Speaking with candor about the inner workings of public broadcasting and how they are at an advantage, Vempati said Doordarshan happily finds itself sitting on a pile of fresh content because "bureaucratic process takes that long to bring content on it. So while the rest of the industry is struggling, we have a large library that has not been seen by audiences across India which we'll roll out in the next few weeks."

Vempati points "history buffs" to Doordarshan's YouTube channel.

"We have the oldest TV interviews with Nehru. In fact, his last TV interview which he gave to an American broadcaster, just weeks before he passed away we have retrieved those, put them on YouTube."

He added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reference to the metaphorical "Lakshman Rekha" when he ordered the first India lockdown became the tipping point for Prasar Bharati to go all-in on mythological content.

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"So one of the questions that bothered me when I joined to serve as a board member and later on as CEO was that all of these iconic serials have immense nostalgia and brand connect but we don't have access to any of this content," Vempati said.

Prasar Bharati took the decision to re-acquire this content late October 2019 but it took a lockdown announcement to fast-track the closure. Ramayan's four episodes a day format was based on the assumption of a 15-day lockdown. Ramayan closed out its re-run in mid-April.

(With IANS inputs)