DD racing against time to ensure CWG broadcast

Commonwealth Games host broadcaster Prasar Bharati is racing against time to ensure coverage as the Organising Committee (OC) has failed to provide most of the venues for testing sophisticated equipment at broadcasting centers at the stadiums.

Updated on: Aug 12, 2010, 18:04:09 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Commonwealth Games host broadcaster Prasar Bharati is racing against time to ensure coverage as the Organising Committee (OC) has failed to provide most of the venues for testing sophisticated equipment at broadcasting centers at the stadiums.

As per earlier extended deadlines, Doordarshan was to get three and a half months to install and test its equipment at each stadium as against international norm of six months but due to delay in civil works the public broadcaster will now get just a month to complete the entire process. September 1 is the new, and perhaps the last, deadline to start testing the equipment.

“Delayed have occurred at different levels,” explained Prasar Bharati chief executive officer B S Lalli, who has written to OC chairperson Suresh Kalmadi regarding the impending dangers of the delays on overall games broadcast. “We have to make for the delays of other agencies and have been forced to compress our timeline for project execution.”

Prasar Bharati had got Rs 366 crore for upgrading its infrastructure and setting up broadcasting centers compatible to high definition signal at 17 games venues two years ago. The agency, whose games budget was not been increased, has been forced to wait as civil works at the stadiums carried out by Sports ministry and other bodies got delayed.

“Till Wednesday the work at half of these venues was still going on,” said a senior Doordarshan official. At Karni Singh Shooting range, the Broadcasting Engineering Consultants India (BECIL) – agency carrying out work for DD --- was to complete work by end of June. BECIL got the site, that too partially, only on June 28. It was to finish all broadcast related work by August 15 but now expects to do the same by mid September.

Even at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, where opening and closing ceremonies of the games would be held, the BECIL’s deadline of August 15 to complete the work will be missed. Documents with HT show that same is the case with Shyama Prasad Mukerjee stadium and Indira Gandhi Indoor stadium, where cycling and wresting events will take place. Even though BECIL had set up initial infrastructure for the broadcasting centers, it cannot test whatever equipment has been installed in absence of power supply. On Wednesday, DD directed BECIL to hire power generators to run the equipment till the Central Public Works Department provides electricity supply.

Despite senior DD officials portraying the picture that “all is well” junior levels official admit of dangers of pushing the broadcaster to the wall. “There is very little time to identify the errors and implement its remedies. We will be working in three shifts to ensure that equipment is in place by mid-September for testing. We will have less than 15 days to ensure world-class broadcast whereas the international norm is that everything should be ready at least six months in advance,” said a DD engineer, who was not willing to be quoted.

Lalli described the situation as of concern and said that DD has been worst affected because of delays as it came at the end of the chain of the entire games planning process.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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