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Simon's email is very long so I've picked out the highlights for you. I'd like to know if you think its fair or not.

Simon writes:
For years I have been championing the virtues of the World Service. The changes you have made over the last year have been very worrying, and this India coverage is really beginning to disgust me.

Fiona takes up the challenge:
I understand that your frustrations are with the entire World Service programming for the "India risising" season and I will try and pass your concerns to someone who has dealt with the overall output. However, you sent your email to us at World Have Your Say and I'll try to defend some of your criticisms.

Simon says:
Most of these features have been to be about boring rich Indians: budding entrepreneurs in the UK, film stars, rich kids, soap stars, pop singers, computer users, more film stars etc — people who are pretty much the same shallow bunch as rich consumers and celebs in Britain or anywhere else in the world.

Others agree:
"Why were there were no poor people on the programme?" Martin
"All your invitees to the programme seems to have domestic servants, probably from a higher 'caste'. I am afraid your selection is not representative of the Indian society because there is no representative from a lower caste. " Frankline, Gent, Belgium.

Fiona defends:
I accept that the live audiences for our World Have Your Say programmes have so far been mostly made up of professional, high-caste Indians. There have been exceptions - in our Chandigarh programme in a discussion of caste, several members were from lower castes. I'll try not to have a list of excuses but there are major issues here with language and technology.

As a live debate programme we need ISDN (radio broadcast quality) lines installed in venues so our audience can hear and interact with the callers from around the world. These can only really be installed in large cities with a local telecomms company who has the facilities and expertise to manage this. It was a huge struggle to get this done in Punjab. I would have loved to take our programme to a rural location and in the planning we certainly looked in to this and took advice from our peers working full time in India.

The only way we could host a programme from a rural location, and get a decent sized audience with good English skills, was to seek help from an NGO working there. We, as a team, felt uncomfortable with being too reliant on people with their own agenda.

Personally I'm very proud that we have managed to take our programme (and the 20 boxes of technical kit that comes with it) to four cities in five days. I went to India on my honeymoon and loved it but really the transport is a nightmare. I've also heard some great disputes between normal Indians with a different outlook on their country and the issues it faces. Voices we haven't heard very much on any global media outlet.

Simon says:
Why don't we hear about the lives of the ordinary Indian peasants who make up three quarters of the country?

There's a big language barrier there but we've tried to do something about that. I've just been on the phone to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Hindi to see what they are getting in and if we can somehow get some translations done and use it in our programme tonight. David has just been on the phone encouraging Rabs, currently in Mumbai, to get out of the city to the shanty town she passed to ask for people to join us or to get some voices on minidisk again to play in to the programme. Don't forget in the first two programmes we talked to people who work with children in servitude and the poor, so those voices are being heard through some of our guests.

Simon says:
What about questions such as - what crops do peasants grow now? Have yields and prices have gone up or down? Has the green revolution helped poor peasants or been a cause of pushing them off the land....

Fiona defends:
World Have Your Say isn't a farming programme. We talk about what our audience wants to talk about, they set the agenda not us. We've been asking you for weeks to tell via this webpage and also live on air and we have put our callers on to put their concerns and questions to our audiences.

Simon says:
...has the caste sytem in the villages changed?...

Fiona defends:
We had a pretty long and passionate arguement about caste in Chandigarh and touch upon it in Delhi. We also had Anu one of our presenters to explain the caste system to some of our callers who wanted more information on it.

Simon says:
...has the position of women in the villages changed?...

Fioan defends:
Again, I've been very pleased by the amount of women's voices we've heard on the programmes. In Delhi and Chandigarh more than half our audience were female. We've touched on women's issues and the role of women in society. It's also refreshing when we have lots of women in the audience but they choose not to talk about "women's issues". I'm sorry to bang on, but our audience set the agenda, not us.

Simon finishes:
Yes, while we're on the subject, would you please stop referring to Bombay as Mumbai. The World Service is an English language station and the English for that city is Bombay, just like the English for Firenze is Florence.

Fiona relents:
We're just following the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ policy. I'll ask Ros and Anu to put it to our Mumbai/Bombay audience and see what they think the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ should call their city!

There are indeed lessons we have learnt from this and I accept some of your points Simon. In retrospect perhaps I should have pushed harder to get a presenter and a producer out in to rural areas to record some conversations before the programme every day. Perhaps I should have pushed harder to find more people from rural or lower caste backgrounds, in fact I definately should. If you want to hear about the improtance of argiculture, and agree with our caller Ronnie from Karnataka yesterday who was saying just that, perhaps our programme yesterday should have been balanced between the rise of technology and is it at the expense of the countryside? We touched on it but perhaps not for long enough.

Thank you for your email. We are trying to improve and better serve our audiences and we appreciate your feedback. I'm really quite pleased with what we've achieved so far this week but I'm a perfectionist, in fact there are several of these in the office, and we must do better.