N. Ram, Chairman of Kasturi and Sons Ltd. and former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Hindu Group of Publications, has said that the hardening economics of the Indian press and the Indian news media indicated that it cannot be business as usual.

“This challenge provides plenty of opportunity to journalists as well as management professionals, especially those who can innovate, give free rein to their imagination, and come up with new ideas on how to do finance journalism and also raise its quality in this digital age.”

He was delivering the 17th annual convocation address at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K) here on Saturday.

Digital age

Mr. Ram said many industries faced challenges to their ways of doing business. And some of them faced challenges to their very existence.

“I come from an industry... a newspaper industry which after a century of buoyant and relatively uninterrupted growth has been growing to a profound transformation, especially in developed countries or matured media markets. This is essential because the industry’s revenue and business model are under serious challenge in this digital age. In most matured media markets, the old business model has collapsed more or less with no viable alternative model in sight.”

Mr. Ram said contemporary India faced two central challenges — mass deprivation and pluralism.

Policy makers had lost too much sleep over palpable reality. Even six decades after Independence, India had not been able to end poverty.

The second big question was the challenge to pluralistic India. This question had come to the fore at the present juncture when communalism was on the offensive and majoritarian ideologues were proclaiming from the rooftops that India was a Hindu nation and Hindutva was its identity. This was a blow to secular Indian citizenship and the Constitution itself.

Communalism

Communalism was a political mobilisation strategy that had made disturbing progress in the past few years, Mr. Ram said. For various reasons, what was clear from the history of India over the past century or more was the wrong or unprincipled understanding of the problem of communalism in society.

Communalism in India was of diverse origin. It was not the monopoly of one community. “There is majority communalism and minority communalism and they feed on each other,” he said.