iWorld
Paytm Insider launches ‘Join The Jalsa’ for nationwide Navratri celebration
Mumbai: It’s that time of the year when the festive spirit is in the air and the country is waiting with bated breath to welcome Navratri. The festival is celebrated with much enthusiasm, complete with rhythmic dancing to dhols as well as delectable cuisine spanning nine nights. And to celebrate this essence of Navratri, India’s leading entertainment platform, Paytm Insider is bringing forth ‘Join The Jalsa’ – a curation of some of the biggest events for you to immerse in this festive season this October.
After last year’s mega response, the platform has expanded its offerings across multiple venues and cities by bringing forth 2x more Navratri events this year as compared to 2022. It has curated a line-up of immersive live events and experiences in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Lucknow, Ahmedabad and Surat for its Navratri campaign. The festival revellers are expected to attend in large numbers, especially in Mumbai & Ahmedabad which are seeing the highest traction in terms of ticket sales.
Mumbai gears up for an epic Navratri season with some of the biggest artists ‘Joining The Jalsa’. Parthiv Gohil at NESCO Center, Goregaon, and Aishwarya Majmudar in Borivali’s Rangtaali promise electrifying nights. The Great Indian Dandiya Festival at Jio World Garden boasts of Divya Kumar (of ‘Kamariya’ fame from the movie ‘Stree’), Shruti Pathak, and Ameya Dabli. You don’t want to miss out on Borivali’s Navrang Navratri with Nilesh Thakkar either!
Ahmedabad is going to witness Colors Gujarati RangRatri, which will be the only on-air and on-ground Navratri event to happen at the Tathastu Party Plot, Sardar Patel Ring Road that spans across one lakh square feet. For an authentic experience of raas-leela, people can join Vrundavan Raas Leela at Iscon Palmsprings.
Surat will be dancing to the tunes of Adityadan Gadhavi, Keerti Sagathia, Priyanka Vaidya, Maulik Baladhiya and Urvashi Patel when they take the stage at G9 Navratri. In Lucknow, Rang-E-Dandiya will be the go to place to celebrate Navratri. Rajasthan’s most awaited and biggest event Dandiya Maharaas & Dussehra Mohotsav 2023 will be happening in Jaipur at Janki Paradise Garden.
Paytm Insider’s business head Varun Khare expressed, “Navratri goes way beyond dance and worship. It’s a showcase of India’s rich diversity, with unique traditions, music, and mouthwatering cuisine in every region. Most importantly, it’s about getting together and having a blast. We’re excited to double down our own offerings as compared to last year and bring you a lineup of the country’s biggest events through our campaign, Join The Jalsa.”
Paytm Insider offers Navratri discounts on select celebrations happening across the country. Get your tickets on Paytm Insider now and ‘Join The Jalsa’, where India dances to Navratri’s rhythm!
https://insider.in/go/navratri-2023
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
