iWorld
Prativa Mohapatra named Adobe India MD and VP
Mumbai: US tech giant Adobe has named Prativa Mohapatra as vice president and managing director for Adobe India. In this role, Mohapatra will lead Adobe’s India business across Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. She will report to Adobe’s president for the Asia Pacific, Simon Tate.
Adobe said its strategy for unleashing creativity, accelerating document productivity, and powering digital businesses gives brands a competitive advantage, enabling them to engage customers across every digital touchpoint. With a track record built on innovation, category leadership, and rapidly expanding market opportunity, the firm said Adobe India is poised for continued growth.
Mohapatra commands over 25 years in the technology industry. She joins Adobe from tech firm IBM, where she served as vice president of digital sales for APAC. Prior to that, she led sales for IBM India and South Asia where she was responsible for driving revenue for the company’s portfolio of solutions and services.
Through her various strategic roles at IBM since joining the company in 2002, Mohapatra has a wide range of experience. This includes leading business transformations, scaling teams to meet hyper-growth and evangelising artificial intelligence technology with customers. She started her career at the professional services firm PwC India.
“Digital has become mission-critical for businesses and Adobe’s market-leading technologies are seeing strong momentum,” said Simon Tate. “Prativa’s passion for technology, and ability to build stellar teams, will take our India business to the next level of growth.”
“Adobe is uniquely positioned as an enabler for everyone- students, creative artists, small businesses, government agencies and the largest brands- to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences,” said Mohapatra. “I am thrilled to join the world-class team at Adobe India and propel our business vision in the country.”
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.
