Is it not surprising if not shocking that in a country like India and perhaps in many other countries the basic, essential and daily consumable eatables like a cup of tea is costlier than a non-essential, far less used thing like a newspaper ?
In India a cup of tea costs about Rs.5 while a newspaper costs about Rs. 2 to 3 only.
There seems no economic or any other logic at all in every government’s policy of subsidizing newspaper costs while letting prices of such essential, bare minimum eatables like a cup of tea to go on rising.
What is more essential to a poor man on the street for his survival ? A cup of tea or a newspaper ?
While those who read newspapers can very very easily bear the real cost of a newspaper, it is daily becoming difficult for a poor, common man on the street to bear rising costs of essential eatable commodities like a cup of tea or milk, a bread piece, a fruit piece etc..
Further while there is so much talk about preserving our forests and other environmental assets, in practice daily perhaps millions of tones of paper is consumed in printing newspapers all over the world.
More surprisingly a newspaper is daily thrown away by everybody in the whole world after not reading it perhaps for more than an hour in a day. What a waste ! Isn’t it ? Where are the so called environmentalists, policy makers etc. who keep talking about preserving our forests etc. ?
What is the compulsion of governments all around in the world to continue subsidizing the costs of printing newspapers while the owners of these newspapers are earning lots of profits ? Perhaps the only reason of this so-obvious anomaly is that every government seems very much scared of the media. They perhaps fear that if they remove all subsidies to media houses for printing newspapers, they all will start exposing grave mistakes of the governments.
In my opinion governments should ensure that the prices of essential, bare minimum eatable commodities like tea, vegetables, fruits, milk etc. must remain within reach of the poorest man on the street and the costs of things like newspapers etc. must not be subsidized at all.
And in case the newspaper publishers recover their costs from advertisements even then the governments should tax them heavily so that costs of bare minimum things like tea, bread, vegetables, fruits etc. can remain low and affordable by poorest of the poor.
This is because those who daily buy a newspaper can surely pay more than the cost of a cup of tea if they really want to read it.
