Professor and Dean, School of Modern Media

• Longlisted for Business Book of the Year, Tata Literary Live 2015 (one of India’s most prestigious book awards)
• The New York Times featured the book prominently:  (https://nyti.ms/2ZIpo0K) 
• Featured high on non-fiction best-seller charts in India, 2015.
This book looks closely at what is happening to India’s television industry, how is it adapting to the rapid digital changes in the country and what India’s television programming tells us about the state of the nation?  In Behind a Billion Screens, Nalin Mehta examines how television works in India, how TV channels make their money or not and what this means for the cacophony that appears on our screens.

Given that television is a strategically vital social gateway for power, he also probes the ownership of television networks — politicians, corporations, real-estate tycoons and tells us why this matters.Based on extensive research and wide-ranging conversations with industry leaders, channel heads, policy makers and politicians, this is a comprehensive report on the state of the Indian television industry, how it is shapeshifting in response to the ferment of mobiles and social media and its vital role in the wider Indian story. Everybody watches television, everybody has an opinion on it and everybody claims to have solutions but Mehta brings new research and understanding to illuminate a topic that often raises a lot of heat and smoke but little light.

PRAISE FOR BEHIND A BILLION SCREENS

1. 'Nalin is probably the best media academic in India…this book is a seminal contribution to the evolving debate about the role of the media in India.’                        — Uday Shankar, CEO Star India (2015); now President, Walt Disney Asia Pacific and Chairman, Star and Disney India http://bit.ly/2OTB3Jg

2. 'Remarkable for being both a distinguished academic and an experienced journalist, Mehta brings to this book the knowledge of a battle-hardened insider, the prose of a gifted story-teller and and the analysis of a fine scholar. This book is a major contribution to media scholarship — and a ripping good read.
— Robin Jeffrey, Emeritus Professor Australian National University and La Trobe University

3. ‘There is a coup underway in India: Some people who are inconvenienced by democracy have taken over nearly all the country’s television news channels….These facts are retold in a new book, “Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India,” by Nalin Mehta, a historian and former television journalist….Mr. Mehta’s book portrays a host of problems facing Indian television, including the tastes of viewers, a lack of talent, youth hampered by poverty and substandard schooling, and government policies that impede the ability of channels to expand their revenues.
-– Manu Joseph in The New York Times, May 13, 2015. http://bit.ly/1I8aA1x

4. ‘Television is dead. This book is its obituary’
— Rajdeep Sardesai, Consulting Editor, India Today Group

5. ‘Formidable book, excellent research. Nalin is well on his way to becoming India’s first media academic’
— Sagarika Ghose, Consulting Editor, The Times of India
‘
6. I love the racy casual style that makes serious matters so clear and interesting.’
— Jawhar Sircar, CEO, Prasar Bharti

7. ‘This is an ambitious book. Its promise is all the more seductive because of author Nalin Mehta’s background as a social scientist and media man…Behind a Billion Screens goes a fair way to meet its promise – it is engaging, full of fresh anecdotes’
— Vanita Kohli Khandekar, Business Standard

8. ‘Mehta’s book is a systemic analysis of Indian media and what brought it to its current state – where talent’s lost in a lattice of hackneyed, uninspired storylines and farcical “bhoot ka phone number” news reports – it also offers the promise of hope..
–- Mumbai Mirror, May 10, 2015

9. 'Nalin’s new book on India’s television practices, “Behind a Billion Screens” is a hotly debated one in the Capital, for there are few pieces of authoritative, research backed books that look at the world of Indian television apart from the punditry on display across social medium and online news portals’ — TheNewsMinute

1o. “This is a well-researched, thoroughly documented account of what ails television in India” – Indian Express, 27 June 2015

11. ‘Nalin Mehta has the rather unusual distinction of being a media academician who has also held a top editorial job in a TV news channel. As a result, his research is impressive and he also tells a good story. In one word, that story is: Indian news television is in a mess. But the tale is fascinating… Mehta’s recommendations to correct this logical mess are precise and logical’ –Sandipan Deb, Mail Today, 14 June 2015

12. “Mehta discusses the reach and social and political implications of television news in the same breath as scandals, fraud and the quest for influence. But the book isn’t dry or academic, referencing House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Hulu and Netflix just as comfortably as the ‘Herfindal- Hirschmann Index’… Overall, Mehta’s background in TV news stands him in good stead, as does his stint on a committee to revamp Prasar Bharati. The ambition of the book sees it through”  – Open, 12 June 2015

With annual revenues of about $17 billion in 2012, India is among the world’s top 15 global media and entertainment markets. While much attention has been focused in recent years on India’s rise as an emerging economy, its great-power potential as the world’s largest democracy and the future trajectory of its growth but the role of India’s burgeoning media industry in this wider story is much less understood. For a country with the world’s largest newspaper market, second largest telecommunications market, third largest television market and second largest Facebook community, the virtual absence of India from most mainstream global communications studies within academia is strange. In revenue terms, India’s share of the global media sector still remains small but within the top 15 media and entertainment economies, only India has had consistent over-15% growth rates for years. Yet, outside of India, within the wider ambit of policy and international relations, few understand the crucial role Indian media play in the ebbs and flows of Indian politics and how central it is to India’s boisterous democracy. This essay concentrates on Indian television and its future directions. Combined with the rise of the other device that has grown faster than toilets in India -- the mobile phone – television has fundamentally reshaped Indian democracy and emerged as a critical social  lever. This essay outlines ownership patterns in Indian television, the divergences and commonalities across regional languages and what this means for India’s democracy.

dia’s 2019 general election was the first national election contested within a truly digital consumption society, wherein approximately half the voting population had access to digital pathways, and another one-third had access to social media. This article argues that what happens on digital platforms is no longer an externality or an adjunct to offline politics—it is constitutive of it and inseparable from larger political mobilisation.

The two western Indian states of Gujarat and Maharashtra together account for 74 out of the
543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament).
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept all 26 Gujarat Lok Sabha seats in 2014. In 2019,
Gujarat, the home ground of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP President, Amit Shah,
remains a major prestige battle. The Congress is counting on making inroads into the state
after doing well in the assembly elections in December 2017 but the BJP seems to have
recovered some ground here since then.
Maharashtra, with 48 Lok Sabha seats, sends the second-highest contingent of members of
parliament to the Lok Sabha after Uttar Pradesh (UP). Like in UP, the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance is facing a tough battle in Maharashtra with a renewed Nationalist
Congress Party leading the United Progressive Alliance’s charge. It has emerged as a major
battleground in 2019 whose result could be decisive for government formation in Delhi.
This paper summarises the political outlook in both these western Indian states and examines
the key factors at play.

With Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking a second term in India's general elections, scheduled between April and May 2019, the outcome of the poll battle will depend a great deal on how 10 states in the country's Hindi-speaking heartland in north and central India vote. Modi's historic win in 2014 as the first leader in three decades to win a full majority in India's lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, was powered by unprecedented gains for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in these states. The BJP won over 84 per cent of seats in the Hindi heartland in that election. This paper summarises the political outlook of India's Hindi heartland in 2019, examines key factors at play in each of its constituent states and puts together cumulative data from the various state-wise opinion polls and assembly elections to illustrate how the Indian political chessboard has shifted and the likely prospects as India heads into its national election.