Media economics in India: Traversing the Rubicon?

Abstract

India is one of the most diverse media economies in the world and presents incredible opportunities for research in the field of media economics and management. At this point in time, we find that the often scattered contours of this area to some extent are a result of its checkered history and salience within the larger field of communication studies. All this has resulted in only a limited set of problematics being explored in the extant scholarship in/on India, compared with the diverse abundance generated internationally. These problematics, outlined in this chapter, oscillate between those triggered by three main concerns: the wider debates in the political economy of media culture, the sporadic reflections on sectors of media businesses, and, over the last decade, by the flashpoints in media policy. This undulating scholarly corpus has however drawn sustenance from a wide variety of theoretical and methodological quarters. These varied influences reflect, to a large extent, conscious desires to grasp the 'economic' phenomenon constituting the media in their deeper, often peculiarly Indian, social and historical contexts, which is also perhaps one reason why we find that this scholarship has largely remained aloof of intellectual orthodoxies marking the field media economics elsewhere in the world.