But in the 1990s, cable television arrived and private channels like Star Plus and Zee TV popped up — and quickly started catering to the lowest common denominator. The number of channels grew, without the talent to fill the airtime.

“The last 15 years of television in India had become a total mess,” Vinta Nanda, managing director of the Asian Center for Entertainment Education, says. In many popular soaps, “Women were all within the household and they didn’t go out and do any work, and they just sat bejeweled, dressed from morning to night.”

Nanda even argues that they hindered the country’s development. Old values had eroded, but on television, “Those value systems were reinstated, re-imbedded, re-underlined all over again, and it really confused people, because people were growing progressively and suddenly seeing that what they are watching is unchanged, so where do I stand?”

Nanda’s organization is not only advising shows on scientific accuracy but it is also pitching new shows to networks. It has a partnership with USC’s Hollywood, Health & Society, which advises U.S. shows such as Homeland and Grey’s Anatomy.

A former TV writer who wrote and produced at least 16 soaps, Nanda experienced the annoyance of having to fill that airtime, at one point writing 70 episodes of a legal drama about divorce while knowing little about law. She’s now encouraging more accuracy, higher quality and shows that relate to viewers’ real lives.

“People who are creating are poles apart from the people who are watching, and I just felt there was a huge need to create that bridge,” she says. “It’s a big struggle within yourself that you can’t create what you want to watch. That’s a lot of creativity that gets wasted.”

Slowly, television has been turning a corner, she says. A good example is the show Balika Vadhu, which has been running since 2008, and follows two children who get married, and later divorce. Forty-six percent of married women in South Asia ages 20 to 24 were married before age 18, according to a UNICEF report — often to escape their families’ desperate economic conditions.

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