The blackout: Doordharshan's folly

	'How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary?' © Getty Images

I was in Bangalore around the the time the first Test between India and Bangladesh was being played and the only channel I could watch the match telecast live had commentary in Tamil. I like to think that I'm an old fashioned fan, committed to Test cricket, but I couldn't watch Test cricket in Tamil for more than fifteen minutes. I tried turning the sound off but that was even worse. Mute meant no crowd noise and no cricket sounds: no appeals, no edges, no satisfying thunk when the ball hit the middle of the bat. Cricket as a dumbshow is infuriating; it feels like pantomime—bloodless and perverse.

At the time I felt sorry for my hosts but not especially worried because I assumed that this was a provincial problem. Once I got home to Delhi, a proper metropolis, the capital of this great republic, normal service would be restored. Except it wasn't, because the dispute between Neo Sports and Doordarshan on the one hand and Neo Sports and cable and satellite operators on the other, made sure that the only Indians watching were the Tamil-speaking audiences of Raj TV.

How has it come to this? How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary? You might say that a contest with Bangladesh is unlikely to make pulses race, but you'd be wrong. Bangladesh helped boot India out of the World Cup, they nearly got the better of a Test match against a full-strength Australian touring side recently, so they're worthy opponents. I think there's a substantial audience for Indo-Bangla Test cricket; not as large as the audience for one-day cricket, of course, but large enough.

What's happening here is that Doordarshan isn't willing to settle for the modest profits that a low-profile Test series with Bangladesh might have brought in. It telecast the one-day matches because the ad revenues are higher for those, but refused to agree terms with Nimbus (which has bought the television rights from the Bangladesh Board) for the Test series. Amazingly Doordarshan was telecasting the one-day series being played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan at the same time as it was conspicuously not doing live coverage of the Indian Test match. This wouldn't be amazing if Doordarshan was a private television station. ESPN/Star as private channels are responsible to their shareholders. If they find that there's more money to be made telecasting ODIs played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan than Test matches featuring India, that's their business.

But Doordarshan, as it never tires of telling us when it suits its purpose, is the 'national broadcaster'. It's paid for by the tax-payer's money. It's happy to use its special relationship with the state to strong-arm other television channels into sharing the cricket that it wants to telecast. When the BCCI sells the rights to international matches played in India, it makes it clear to the purchaser that the live feed and the revenues accruing from the telecast will have to be shared with Doordarshan. So private broadcasters pay vast sums of money for television rights and when Doordarshan thinks there's enough money to be made, it piggy-backs on them to get its snout into the trough.

Now I happen to think that the fan's urge to watch cricket matches live and for free doesn't amount to a fundamental right. I'm devoted to cricket and I think anything that helps reach the game to Indian fans is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that free-to-air telecasts of live cricket on state television should be mandatory. Cricket for its audiences is a form of entertainment: covering it doesn't qualify as public-service broadcasting. There's no large public good being served here: telecast cricket is a commodity and there's no reason for the state to intervene to make sure that it's available for free. If Doordarshan wants to subsidize its consumption by the general public, it should be willing to buy the rights or pay top dollar for sharing the feed.

But Doordarshan, supported by the Indian state, argues that telecasting international cricket featuring India is a form of public service broadcasting. The only justification for its claim that it has a mandatory right to 'share' live pictures is its invocation of the Indian poor who love the game but can't afford to watch it on cable. Given the fact that more and more people receive Doordarshan not directly through their aerials but via cable this isn't, even on its own terms, a watertight argument. But let us, for the sake of argument, allow that Doordarshan has a legitimate case, that DD National is a unique vehicle for carrying the exploits of the Indian cricket team to the plebeian fan. In which case, how is this purpose served by covering Sri Lanka's matches with Pakistan when India is playing Bangladesh?

If the 'public good', defined as the Indian fan's right to watch his heroes play, trumps private profit when it comes to the World Cup or a Test series between India and Australia played in India, how come this logic doesn't apply to the India-Bangladesh series? By Doordarshan's own logic its willingness to telecast ODIs featuring two foreign nations while ignoring India's champions as they labour in the heat of Chittagong, besides being inconsistent, amounts to a kind of treachery. If DD's invocation of the straitened Indian fan helps it muscle its way into vast revenues, surely it should use those revenues to subsidize the telecast of series that might be less profitable. If it doesn't (as it hasn't with the Bangladesh series) it should forfeit its right to share telecast rights to matches featuring India that have been bought at huge cost by others.

Doordarshan's greed and callousness apart, the blackout of the Bangladesh Tests is a symptom not so much of Test cricket's decline in the sub-continent as the BCCI's deliberate orphaning of Test cricket. The Board's greed for ODI revenues has led to the overloading of the Indian team's calendar with standalone ODI contests. This has gone hand-in-hand with the Board's unwillingness to build a cricket season around a major Test series (as the Australian Board has done with its end-of-year Test matches), its failure to make tickets for Test matches available in advance and the failure of provincial boards to build decent facilities in their stadiums. Stadiums like Chepauk and Mohali that have attended to these things have large Test match attendances. Television revenues from ODIs have so debauched the BCCI and the its affiliated boards that they have no interest in the hard work necessary to keep Test cricket viable and popular in the modern media marketplace. Despite the amount the amount of Test cricket played the world over, between the BCCI and Doordarshan it won't be long before live Test cricket on Indian television becomes an occasional treat, not a constant pleasure.

This post is adapted from an article that appeared in The Telegraph, Kolkata, which can be read here.