Denying allegations of gender bias in sports coverage, AIR has decided to broadcast the final match on Sunday.
The Indian women’s team may have earned accolades for the stunning victory against Australia the ongoing ICC Women's World Cup 2017 semi-finals, but back home, the match has failed to get coverage from India’s public broadcasters All India Radio and Doordarshan.
According to sources, this is not even the first time that the AIR or DD had missed out on a women’s sports event.
During the last 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the AIR team kept its focus on the men’s events, thus leaving out most of the women’s events, which went on to win two medals for the country.
An official from AIR said, “This was widely discussed in AIR then, on why the women’s events were missed out. But, the fact remains that the team was present only in areas where the men’s games were on. In fact, it has been a trend to ignore live coverage of women’s events for years
Under fire from different corners, AIR has now decided to broadcast the ICC Women's World Cup Finals --where India would be playing against England on Sunday --on 66 primary channels of AIR, FM Gold as well as multi-channel stations, with officials denying any gender bias on the public broadcaster’s part in covering sports events.
A senior official said the reason AIR couldn’t broadcast the women’s cricket match on Thursday because it had failed to get the requisite broadcast rights for the match from a private channel on time, which had bought the rights from the ICC.
“We managed to get the broadcast rights only on Friday,” the official told DNA, adding that AIR had applied for it about a month ago.
The official said for several matches, broadcast rights had to be applied for well in advance, sometimes as early as two years.
“Also, the buying broadcast rights can range between a few thousands of rupees and crores of rupees. Being a public broadcaster, we cannot always afford to by such expensive rights and thus leave out on certain events,” the official said.
AIR insiders said that the public broadcaster had also trimmed down its expenses to such a large extent that many of its sports commentaries are carried out by monitoring the television channels instead of being present at the match venue.
DD, on the other hand, also refrained from broadcasting Thursday’s cricket match. Sources said DD did not get the rights to broadcast the game from the private channel as it was too expensive.
The ministry of information and broadcasting (I&B) has a list of games which has to be compulsorily shared with DD and women’s cricket is not part of the list.
“It could have been bought separately, but it would have been too expensive for a public broadcaster. That’s because the rights would have to be bought at a higher price than what the private party has bought from ICC,” an official explained.
Both DD and AIR garner their highest advertisement revenues during sports events, mostly cricket matches, which enjoys a higher popularity in rural India.
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