The Tribune is sinking. Financially it is about to land at the ICU.

Sukhdev Singh is a senior journalist and erstwhile The Tribune staffer.

He raises certain issues with why The Tribune, including Punjabi Tribune and Dainik Tribune are currently on the verge of collapse.

We are carrying this piece because The Tribune Group of Newspapers is not only an esteemed media house but also a 139 year old Punjab institution. Read on:

I AM CONSTRAINED to report to my FB friends that The Tribune is sinking. Financially it is about to land at the ICU.

It suffered a loss of Rs. 18.75 crore in the last two years. For the Q1/21, its loss amounted to an unprecedented Rs. 12.56 crore.

This figure may escalate to something like Rs. 35-40 crore, if no major remedial correctives are put in place. The institution may thus have eaten up nearly 50% of its surplus cash reserves soon.

At stake is the bread and butter for nearly 1500 employees and their families, and for Punjab its heritage of 139 years.

It may not be wholly accurate to trace its current plight as a fall-out of coronavirus or the current widespread economic distress. The institution has been on a critical coarse for quite some time. It has been a rudderless boat with a lazy and worthless management.

The Tribune is steered by a Trust whose members now comprise men with no idea or experience of journalism or business of newspaper industry. They are retired and fairly exhausted public servants. They are not trained to manage this sensitive business domain.

The former bureaucrats only know of the ways of the executive. They treat the newspaper as no more than extension of the executive. This has implications for the way The Trust selects The Tribune editors and the way they should go about. The Trust, constituted as it is, is inherently disabled to perform or lead an increasingly competitive world of newspaper industry.

I may recall that the The Trust was floated by a Sikh sardar, Dayal Singh Majithia, a scion of one of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh’s Generals. The founder’s mandate was clear and specific: the Trustees are to spend all surpluses to put the newspaper on a footing of permanency.

Further, the Sardar’s own initially selected trustees should have been a sufficient clue to how the further trustees were to be selected. All three initia trustees were specialists drawn from the fields of finance and law and management.

There is data to know that Sardar Dayal Singh was wary of socialising with the bureaucracy. Also well known is how strict and stern he was about handling and accountability of matters money.

There were times when trustees like Lala Badri Das would come to attend its meetings carrying their own lunch boxes. They would be reluctant to accept a cup of tea out of the Trust’s account.

Things took a contrary turn with the onset of a bureaucrat in 1978 as its General Manager. Then slowly started a lavish practice of holding all such meetings at five-star hotels and the like.

The current President and some of his colleagues have been recklessly frittering away the Trust’s surplus funds as if they were Chief Minister/ministers running a government with discretionary financial powers.

Here are some instances of how the Trust funds were given away to certain private institutions with which each of them was associated in some or the other form.

Mr S. S. Sodhi: Chandigarh Lawn Tennis Association as its Patron Rs 45 lakh.

In addition he spent out of the Tribune kitty a sum of Rs 9 lakh to organise a booklet release function at Chandigarh.

Mr N. N. Vohra: as its Chairman/President of India International Centre Approximately Rs 20 lakh.

Again, on a Jallianwala Bagh function Rs 15 lakh.

Mr Vohra functioned for years simultaneously as J&K governor and as The Tribune Trustee. He authorised the launch of editions of The Tribune from Jammu and Srinagar without a prior examination of these editions’ financial viability.

Resultantly, The Tribune has been suffering massive losses every year on these editions’ meagre revenues. Hardly 6000 copies are sold daily at Jammu and a mere 1200 at Srinagar, a dismal performance by any reckoning and a massive drain on the institution’s networth.

However, these editions ideally served Mr. Vohra with his penchant for viewing his own pictures and news at each page of his own baby.

Not to be left behind was Lt Genel S.S.Mehta who granted Rs 20 lakh to the Poone International Centre.

As such, a massive, unauthorised drain on the Trust’s resources by a combination of an old, tired bureaucracy and a matching inefficient management have all but ruined this institution with some good record of independent journalism behind it.

I say with sadness that Vohra being on two positions created a conflict of interest. Now he is no longer Governor but the rot has set in deep. Hence, I am alerting the Trustees. I had done so earlier too, but no one paid attention.