India, Nov. 14 -- Putting together a live bulletin in the 1970s, writes Harsaran Bir Kaur Pandey, felt like leaping from a plane without a parachute and landing cleanly every night. That image anchors The Evolution of TV News in India: From Doordarshan to Digital Disruption (Om Books International), part institutional history, part media critique, part eyewitness testimony. Pandey is no mere chronicler; she helped write the medium's grammar.

Inventing it as they went

Indian television news began not in glossy studios but in the draughty corridors of Akashvani Bhawan, on stubbornness and nerve.

Pandey joined Doordarshan in 1972 as one of its first two women news producers, and the only one in the Delhi newsroom. She likens the chaos to ...