TVi: TRYING HARD TO STAY ALIVE

The Mumbai-based Advani family promoted Business India TV (BiTV) has drawn up a blueprint for a major restructuring which envisages downsizing its operations, including employees who number over 400. BiTV runs the affairs of the satellite television channel, TVi.

Nandan Unnikrishnan, consultant to TVi who is responsible for its day-to-day operations says: "We would be downsizing by about 25-30 per cent to cut costs."

Interestingly, Unnikrishnan pointed out that the downsizing would start from the very top. As part of its head count shrinking, BiTV terminated the services of nine employees recently. Incidentally, all the nine were active union members. Though Unnikrishnan refused to comment on this, but BITV sources said that the downsizing is linked to the proposed infusion of fund in the Business India group by foreign investors.

A few months back both Ashok Advani, head of the BI group and associate publisher of BI magazines and executive chairperson of BiTV, Malavika Singh, had gone to Germany to woo investors. Dutch media group, VNU, has already picked up sizeable equity stakes in various Business India ventures, including ORG-Marg, a market research company.

"The downsizing would start with the programming division followed by the HRD and marketing divisions," Unnikrishnan said, adding, "This has been necessitated as the board of TVi has taken a decision, in principle, to do away with everyone except the bare minimum."

An indicator to this is the apparent sidelining of Singh. "I do not look after day-to-day activities of BiTV anymore," she recently said.

Launched in 1995, TVi has been facing a severe cash crunch for the last 36 months or so and, at various times, has come almost on the brink of total collapse.

Unnikrishnan said the employees union has also been sounded out on this and during an agreement signed with the union in April, 1999 one of the clauses pertained to the impending downsizing wherein it had been stated the "expenses would be cut to match the existing revenues."

About 150 BiTV employees (some have left since then) have moved the Delhi labour commissioner's office seeking legal redressal. Late 1997, TVi turned itself into a news and current affairs channel from an omnibus channel to create a niche for itself. But till date its revenues have failed to pick up.