Daily The Hindu Editorials Notes – Mains Sure Shot (11/09/2019) for UPSC/IAS 

Note – Today there is only one editorial in the Hindu. The rest are either a critic of the government policy or do not have enough content.

 Question – Is Same Language Subtitling (SLS) a butterfly for literacy? Explain ( 250 words)

Context – Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) recently mandated captioning for TV programming in order to make it accessible to the Deaf or Hard of Hearing population.

What is Same Language Subtitling?

• Same language subtitling (SLS) refers to the idea of subtitling motion media programmes (television and film) in the ‘same’ language as the audio.
• It was first implemented by the United States to make TV programmes more accessible to the deaf or hard of hearing.
• In India, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has recently mandated captioning for TV programming in order to make it accessible to the Deaf or Hard of Hearing population.
• The plan of implementation laid down by the Ministry are as follows: the phase-wise implementation plan requires all 800 plus channels to start this on at least one programme a week, beginning August 15, 2019, Independence Day. By 2020, 10% of all programming must have captions; the figure is to grow by 10% every year, covering up to 50% of all programming by 2025.
• This policy is based on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 which made “sub-titles” on TV a right.

Why is it significant for India?

1. It is significant for India because scaling up SLS on TV will serve two goals: media access and reading literacy.
2. There are many countries that have followed the U.S.’s lead in implementing SLS but for India the purpose is more than just facilitating the rights of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It can be a drive for promoting ‘mass reading’.
3. It will also help in facilitating the SDG-4. The SDG-4 is about promoting the quality of education and quality education, foundationally, depends on good reading skills.
4. India has a billion TV viewers. The average Indian watches TV for 3 hours and 46 minutes every day, according to the latest FICCI–EY Media & Entertainment report (2019). Film (24%) and general entertainment (53%) are the dominant genres. All of this content is now required to have SLS, in all languages.
5. Scientific evidence suggests that SLS on TV generally serve three goals: daily and automatic reading literacy practice for one billion viewers, Indian language improvement for one billion viewers, and, finally, media access for 65 million aurally challenged people.
6. Also, Studies in India have shown that SLS causes automatic and inescapable reading engagement even among very weak readers who can barely decode a few letters; regular exposure to SLS leads to measurable reading skill improvement, and improved reading skills result in much higher rates of newspaper and other forms of reading. And subsequently they even become good readers.
7. Inspired by this, there is an active campaign in the United Kingdom to Turn-On-The-Subtitles (TOTS) by default in children’s programming.
8. Also for more than a decade the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) have found that, nationally, half the rural children in standard 5 cannot read standard 2-level texts. This is despite all system-level improvement drives, so we need some out of the box solutions and backed by evidence this can be a good one.

Is it possible to implement it smoothly?

• The English TV channels in India already provide subtitling for most of the movies and shows to facilitate the Indian audience to comprehend the unfamiliar English accent. This has also helped increase viewership. So if they can do it smoothly, the other channels can follow the instructions of MIB and gradually get used to subtitling all the shows on their channel.

need/ way ahead:

• The MIB has taken the lead, the next step would be the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology  to mandate SLS on all digital Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms [Over the top (OTT) refers to film and television content provided via a high-speed Internet connection rather than a cable or satellite provider]. Although translation subtitling is commonplace on OTT platforms and they offer SLS in English, none of them have SLS in the Indian languages, such as ‘Hindi subtitles for Hindi content’ and so on. This is simply because the policy does not yet require SLS on OTT.
• The entertainment industry must be made aware of the vital role it can play in mass reading by simply turning on SLS for audio-visual content in all Indian languages.
• Note: keep in mind that subtitling and dubbing are not the same thing.