The visit of PCI team
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: September 26, 2013 -
It is definitely not an every day affair for anyone to expect the officials of Press Council of India (PCI) to come to visit Manipur to take stock of the situation in which the journalists are working in this conflict-ridden and strife-torn State and the problems being faced by them in performing the duty of disseminating information on day- to-day happenings and other important issues of the State to enlighten the people.
After having been to as many as ten trouble-torn States of the country like Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya, a six-member official team of PCI sub-committee led by its convenor Kosuri Amarnath arrives here and is current at Imphal on a two-day fact finding mission to study and understand the issue of safety and security of journalists working in a volatile and charged atmosphere like Manipur.
In fact, this is the first ever visit by any official team from PCI to Manipur, where journalists have been struggling hard to perform their duties against all odds, ranging the pittance they get at the end of every month as salary to the threats from various quarters.
It is also a place, where the Government’s response to such threats, has always been immediate deployment of police personnel at the media houses.
So, the question of freedom of speech or press is something which is nonexistence here.
Bing a statutory body that governs the conduct of the print media throughout the country, the visit of the PCI sub-committee members, who have been mandated to study the issue of safety and security of journalists in different parts of the country, is a very significant one for the journalists working in a State like Manipur all the more.
The visit of the PCI officials is not just to interact with journalists and other stakeholders in the trouble-torn States where attacks and killings of journalists are taking place for understanding the kinds of problems being faced, but more particularly to examine the desirability as well as the possibility of enacting a special law at the all India level for the protection of the journalists.
Accordingly, based on the feedbacks gathered during their visit and interaction with the journalists in different parts of the country, the sub-committee would be submitting a report to the Parliament for necessary action on the recommendations made.
All these are okay.
But the point that we would like to raise here is, threats on the lives of working journalists, whether it comes from lawful or unlawful elements, are very much part of the job.
It is an associated professional hazard from which one could not free himself or herself, whether they work in Manipur or elsewhere.
So, deployment of security personnel at media houses or providing security escorts to journalists could never be the solution to the problem of threats.
Instead, efforts should be made towards encouraging the Government to come up with more welfare schemes which would take care of the needs of the journalists as well as their family members even if they die in the line of duty.
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