The Hindu : New Delhi News : Centre asked to clarify guidelines on cricket telecast

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Thursday, Dec 27, 2007
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New Delhi

Centre asked to clarify guidelines on cricket telecast

Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has directed the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry to inform it if there are guidelines for declaring cricket matches sporting events of public interest for telecast on Doordarshan.

A Division Bench, comprising Justices T.S. Thakur and Veena Birbal passed the direction on a petition by Ravi Dev Gupta, seeking a direction to the Ministry to treat all Test matches on a par with One-Day International and Twenty-Twenty matches as sporting events of public interest and ensure their telecast on Doordarshan.

“Not bound to telecast”

The government, in October, notified that all Test matches were not of great public interest and Doordarshan was, therefore, not bound to telecast them.

The notification, however, said all one-day and Twenty-Twenty matches deserved to be telecast on Doordarshan as they were of great public interest.

The telecast of Test matches was decided on a case-to-case basis, the notification said.

Asking the Ministry to file its clarifications to the Court’s query by January 8, the Bench wanted to know how the Ministry decided that a particular Test match was of public interest and deserved to be telecast.

There must be some guidelines for arriving at a decision on declaring a particular match of public interest. Otherwise, the message would go that the decision was taken arbitrarily and on extraneous grounds, the Bench said.

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