Green TV: India’s only private channel for farmers

Dubai — Revenues are important but Junaid Memon hopes to make rural respectable with Green TV, India’s only private channel for farmers with a social message. The TV commercial and movie producer says he’s giving something back to the country with this venture, something that has been close to his heart since 2010.

The channel began beaming last September and the team behind it is taking it one step at a time, expanding the channel’s reach to 70 per cent of the country which live in villages. Junaid claims he’s got his calculation, content and technology concoction right: entertainment with a rural feel, something visually appealing for the real masses that larger media houses have chosen to ignore all this while.

Excerpts from an interview:

Yours is the only private channel in India focused on farmers and environment-friendly programming.

Yes, Green TV is the first private channel to launch 24x7 programming dedicated to India’s vast rural population. Green TV is not solely about environmental awareness, although many of our programmes are about environment-related issues.

Seventy per cent of India’s population has lived in villages. That number hasn’t really declined over the years, but their quality of life has. While urban India is spoilt for choice, rural India remains where it is. The focus for all marketers remains urban India.

We have over 200 channels catering to just 30 per cent of the population. What about the remaining 70 per cent?

We talk about India moving into the 21st century, yet we hardly take much interest in the lives of those who can actually make us economically stronger.

For me, Green TV is not a business venture. It is a mission with a clear vision, which is to make the rural mean ‘respectable’.

You’re an entrepreneur, someone who has dabbled in movies. Why so serious with a ‘niche’, Green channel?

Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. I still love making movies and producing commercials, but I always had this desire to do something more impactful, something that will have a longer shelf life. Green TV fits into that space quite comfortably. Reality can be more interesting than fiction. It can be more inspirational, emotional and dramatic. So my team and I have got a brilliant opportunity to use our skills to the fullest as communicators.

The channel is in Hindi with a Tamil launch planned soon. What revenues (sources) you looking at? Are you expanding too fast, too wide? Surely, this can’t be public service; for that there’s Doordarshan, the Indian government-backed service.

Yes, you are right this is not a purely public service venture; we have our revenue model planned well. What makes us different is our reach, our big horizon, the vast spread.

Green TV will build on the opportunity to tap a lot of brands which will be first time advertisers. Brands that have never even thought of producing a TV commercial in the past… not because they never wanted to, but because there was no focused channel for their target consumers. Green TV offers them that very platform.

We are not expanding too fast. The Tamil feed has been planned right from the channel’s inception but will start when we are fully ready.

Any partners for this venture? Would you go in for collaboration with foreign investors, service providers?

We are in talks with a few venture capitalists, including foreign investors. Green TV is open to collaboration with both Indian and foreign partners, as long as social responsibility precedes profit. Green TV does not exist merely to make money. Of course revenue is critical, but our partners should also be aligned with our cause.

Is your expertise in films a creative asset to the channel? Is there something more we can expect from it later, something on the entertainment lines?

TV is about entertainment, right? And entertainment is not only about movies. Our shows are packaged in such a way that our consumers not only find them informative but also entertaining. Even social issues, when packaged well, tend to be better received and easily grasped. Films such as Munnabhai and 3 Idiots are great examples of important social communication mixed with quality entertainment.

My movie-making experiences will help me develop interesting and entertaining shows. I am really lucky to have such a passionate and like-minded programming team which is helping me achieve my goals.

Do you plan to connect every Indian village?

We are the first TV channel to have a distribution team of about 35 travelling through villages and midsize towns for months trying to reach out to those cable operators who never get importance from broadcasters.

We have managed to reach even the remotest of villages via cable. After seeing our reach, DTH operators who were initially unwilling to carry Green TV or expected huge carriage fees are now expressing interest. Our push in the rural market is giving a boost to these cable operators who were previously neglected.

Apart from conventional cable & DTH, our live feed is available on mobile devices also. The reason we are on mobile devices is because 50 per cent of the rural population still don’t have electricity supply for more than 6 hours (to answer your question about India still living in its villages); almost every villager has a mobile phone. In fact, smartphones have started penetrating rural markets too.

Finally, would this service be available in the UAE; would you consider an Arabic service to serve the Middle East?

It’s a satellite channel and is available across Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. Or, in other words, we are visible wherever INTELSAT 20 has its footprint. If you tune your dish to our frequency, you can watch Green TV in the UAE or anywhere else in the Middle East.

We also have expansion plans for the African market as well as Indonesia after a year or so. We haven’t planned anything exclusively for the Middle East at the moment, but if we see the merit, we may soon start an Arabic service of the channel.