Although the economic reforms have attracted wide media coverage across the world in recent times, several areas of life in the country still remain unexplored largely due to the "politics-centric domestic media", say experts.

"Media in the US pays very little attention to India although that is not true of the New York Times. We have had correspondents in India since World War II. But in the process only India is losing out on foreign investment in the country. A wide coverage of India in foreign media would attract more investment," says Abe Rosenthal, veteran New York Times columnist and an old Indian hand. "There was of course lot of interest in India generated by the Pokhran nuclear tests last year," Rosenthal, who was here recently toattend the golden jubilee seminar of PTI, said. "I was probably the only American journalist to defend the Pokhran tests. Unfortunately, there were not many in the US who agreed with my views," Rosenthal says. However, "the nuclear tests again attracted the international media attention to only one aspect.

There are so many other sectors of national life which still remain unexplored," says N Bhaskar Rao, chairman of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), here.

"India, before the economic reforms, was seen by the Western media as a country of snake charmers and elephants. The reform process has attracted some attention but it is still not as much as the country deserves as a leader in information and communication technology, says Rao.

However, international news agencies maintain that their coverage of India has increased over the years and now every aspect of the country gets due coverage. "India is covered by the Associated Press (AP) like any other country. AP tries to cover everything - politics,natural calamities, disasters, cultural scene - all aspects that would interest anyone," says Claude Erbsen, vice-president of AP.

According to Mark Wood, Editor-in-chief of Reuters, coverage of countries in Asia, Africa and the Gulf has increased after the breakup of the erstwhile Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

"Coverage of these countries has in fact been steadily increasing. It is now outdated to measure coverage by column inches in the New York Times or the London Daily Telegraph," Wood says. For example, in one particular week in March, Reuters produced no less than 481 news reports about India. In the past year the figure was 24,498.

"If you look into our business briefing database which collects information from 4,000 source including Reuters, you will find 2,22,450 items of information about India for the past 12 months. For the past week the figure was 3,381. "Reuters is not in the business of producing information that customers do not want and these figures just show how big the appetite fornews and other information is," he said at the PTI seminar. According to Pascal Talliander, director of the South Asia bureau of AFP, it is the business-related developments rather than politics that interest the world outside. He sees reporting India as a challenging assignment which is becoming "difficult". "Contrary to the perception in the West that India is still a land of snake charmers, there is large part of India which is developed and already into the 21st century which is being reported. (PTI)