No Olympic gold for DD

Despite the 2008 Beijing Olympics becoming the most watched sporting event in India in the last few years, the event’s exclusive broadcaster, Doordarshan, has lost money, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 26, 2008, 24:53:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Despite the 2008 Beijing Olympics becoming the most watched sporting event in India in the last few years, the event’s exclusive broadcaster, Doordarshan, has lost money.

Over 30 million Indians watched the closing ceremony at Beijing. This was far more than the 24 million who saw the IPL finals in Mumbai this year, said aMAP, the company that measures television viewership.

“The closing ceremony had the highest viewership. A large number of people also watched the boxing matches of Vijender Kumar and Akhil Kumar,” a company official said.

However, only 18 million people watched the opening ceremony.

“There was a sudden jump after Bindra’s medal with people keenly following events in which Indians were involved,” said an analysis by TAM, another audience measurement company.

Only 8.6 million had tuned in to watch the opening ceremony of the Athens games and 5.2 million saw the closing ceremony.

Interestingly, Doordarshan sent a 74- member contingent to cover the event while there were only 57 Indian participants at the games. The channel spent 17 crore, but expects to earn around Rs 8 crore.

“We may not get the expected money because of some problems in planning,” said a senior DD official.

DD had to face a lot of flak for not airing Bindra’s interview after he won his gold. There was a question mark over the quality of commentary and match analysis.

Information and Broadcasting minister P.R. Dasmunsi was, however, satisfied. “To me, the coverage was good,” he told HT.

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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