What happens when you have too many star anchors on just one channel? You have to allot each of them a solo programme. Even if the programme is completely redundant. At 7:30 pm every weekday, Sunetra Choudhury presents a newly launched show called Agenda on NDTV 24X7. The show follows a debate format on the day’s most important news. A few specialists or analysts who Sunetra refers to as “pundits” on the programme, fight for and against a topic – and two groups of audience members assist Sunetra in asking questions.

The programme has been advertised as one-of-its-kind. One in which the viewer is a participant in the discourse. However, there are many such shows where the viewer is a part of the discussion, many on NDTV 24X7  itself. Be it We the Peopleor Big Fight on NDTV or Right to be Heard on Headlines Today. But it’s not the lack of a novelty factor which makes this show redundant and quite pointless.

First a look at the topics covered in the programme in the past week- Are new divorce laws anti-men? NaMo setting 2014 agenda? English key to success? Should mid-day meals be scrapped? The problem with the topics is that by the time Sunetra blows the whistle for the shouting marathon on these topics to begin, they’ve already been debated ad nauseum on all other channels and her own for the past 36 hours. The Modi debate had already been done to death and the Hindi vs English debate has been going on ever since our British forefathers left this country.

However, Agenda’s biggest drawback is that despite catching up a tad late on a topic, there is hardly any in-depth research or relevant facts and statistics which makes this programme stand apart. If you take the episode on whether the mid-day meal scheme should be scrapped in the aftermath of the death of over 20 children in Chhapra, Choudhury only confined herself to asking questions on whose fault it was.The showdidn’t delve deeper.As a viewer I would have liked to have known – which are the states that have miserably failed in implementing the scheme? Why have some states succeeded? What are the checks and balances in place to monitor the quality of food served to school children? What was the reaction of the Bihar government to the tragedy? Did they handle it in the right way? And most importantly, what is the nutritional value of the food provided?

No such questions were asked or relevant data presented. Rather the debate was reduced to one on how poor people are getting a raw deal. But then dragging the debate to a rich vs poor level gives one the easy option of sermonizing, instead of highlighting hard facts.You can make an emotional appealsuch as -“Does the government not care about poor people because they won’t get on social media to complain?”- and get away. This is the kind of trick which college debaters and beauty pageant contestants often resort to.  And it’s just not Choudhuryalone who is guilty of not doing adequate research. Even the “pundits” on her panel were equally clueless.

On the midday scheme debate, lawyer-activist for the midday meal scheme, Ashok Aggarwal said, “70-80 % of children of this country go to government school with empty stomachs and wait for the midday meal”. Similarly, another pundit, Swarup Sarkar -fromThe Family Foundation –during the ‘Are new divorce laws anti-men?’ debate said that “80 % of the males in this country have no inherited property”.But they never reveal the source of their statistics. Equally shoddy are the arguments made on the show. The debate on ‘English key to success’ began over BJP president Rajnath Singh’s comment that it is because of English language that we are neglecting our own culture. To this, Dalit activist Chandrabhan Prasad speaking in favour of the motion argued, “What is Rajnath Singh’s stand on Valentine’s day, boys and girls hugging and meeting?” The proof of the inanity is in pundits’ pontifications.

And when the show manages to put together a panel comprising academicians like MadhuKishwar and Tushar Gandhi, this is what happens.

Madhu Kishwar: Why can’t we have names of medicines and details printed on medicine bottles in regional language?

Tushar Gandhi: Oh! Then I can’t read a medicine bottle if I am in Madras.

Madhu Kishwar: No it can be printed in two languages.At least have mercy on those people who can’t read English.

Tushar Gandhi: This is a very stupid argument to make in today’s time.

Madhu Kishwar:  I can’t believe this is Mahatma Gandhi’s great grandson speaking.

Tushar Gandhi: Madhu don’t bring Mahatma Gandhi here. We are debating over a topic not against each other.

Maybe the air in the Agenda studio is so rarefied that the oxygen depletion from the brain leads even usually intelligent panelists to start spouting inanities. Do we really need to put ourselves through this ordeal? The guests are unprepared. The debates are shallow, meandering and lose focus by the end of the programme. Sunetra banks on the audience to ask questions and does little more than walking with the mike from one member in the audience to the other. By the end of the debates I at least didn’t learn even one new fact or gain any new perspective. The only silver lining is that it is 22 minutes long at best.

What I wasn’t able to figure out was from where the need for this show arose. Agenda is telecast half an hour after the mind-numbing The Social Network – in which the anchor referred to author and journalist Jerry Pinto as a well-known actor. It is followed by Nidhi Razdan’s Left, Right and Centre- again a debate-based show. The question that you can’t not ask is – is NDTV running out of creative ideas for designing its shows? While I understand that when you have so many star anchors you can’t just relegate them to something as infra dig as vanilla reporting, NDTV could at least come up with new concepts. It’s awfully tiring to watch what seems to be unending debates night-after-night on prime time.