Tidbits of the region’s media

It seems that the financial situation at the BBC is even direr than earlier presumed. In early November, Chhetria Patrakar was baffled and dismayed – still is – to find that the 'South Asia' section had disappeared from the BBC's news site; instead, the news from the region was found hidden under the broad rubric of 'Asia'. According to a post by the world editor, the decision to lump news from the regions 'Asia-Pacific' and 'South Asia' under one heading was taken because – here is the wacky bit – the BBC's geographically challenged readers had been complaining that they could not understand the earlier headings. Bollocks! And here CP had regarded the BBC as an upfront news site unafraid of calling a downsizing a downsizing. How these changes will 'increase … coverage' on the region and make the site 'more relevant' to users is beyond CP. Hopefully the subsections that currently include 'Asia Business' and 'China', and which will later display 'India' as well, will slowly be expanded to include all the 56 countries listed in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand (!). (Also, BBC-wallahs: ashmita does not mean 'very tough', as mentioned in a piece on renaming unwanted girls, but 'pride', which can be very tough.)

Although India might have been favoured by the BBC for being one of the most populous countries in the world, it is the Maldives that has won the race (oh, there's a race alright!) in the region for having the largest percentage of population online. According to recently released World Bank statistics, some 28.4 percent of Maldivians are wired to the web through broadband connections, more than twice the number of Pakistanis (second, at 12 percent). The numbers continue to plummet from there: Sri Lanka (8.6), Bhutan (7), India (5.3), Afghanistan (3), Nepal (2.1) and Bangladeshis (0.4). All in all, pretty dismal. As a whole, Internet use in Southasia has increased over the past decade, from 0.5 percent in 2001 to 5.5 percent in 2009, but this still remains the least impressive such figure around the globe. Even Sub-Saharan Africa (to which the Subcontinent often, and unfairly, gets compared) now has 8.8 percent of its population happily Facebooking.