India updates rules on free-to-air sporting events

NEW DELHI: India’s government has just redrawn the list of sporting events too important to lock behind a paywall, and had to issue a correction within days of doing so. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting notified a fresh set of sporting events of national importance on 11th June, superseding a 2022 notification, under powers granted by the Sports Broadcasting Signals Act of 2007, the law that forces broadcasters to share signals of designated events with Prasar Bharati so they reach free-to-air television.

The new list is sweeping. All Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games and Asian Games make the cut automatically, alongside a sprawling roster of cricket, tennis, hockey, football, badminton and kabaddi fixtures. Cricket gets the most generous treatment by far: every official one-day, Twenty20 and Test match played by the Indian men’s and women’s teams qualifies, as does every International Cricket Council Test match featuring India, the semi-finals and finals of the men’s and women’s ODI and T20 World Cups, the Champions Trophy, the World Test Championship, the Asia Cup, and India’s matches at the Under-19 World Cup.

Tennis fans get the Davis Cup in full whenever India features, plus the men’s and women’s singles finals at Grand Slams and any match involving an Indian player from the quarter-finals onward, in singles or doubles. Hockey’s list runs from the World Cup and Champions Trophy to the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup and the FIH Hockey Pro League, while football covers World Cup openers, quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals, the Asia Cup, and the Santosh Trophy knockout stages. Badminton’s All England Open and the Badminton World Federation World Cup make the list too, as does the Kabaddi World Cup, alongside anything under the Khelo India Mission umbrella.

A handful of events, including shooting and archery’s Commonwealth championships and certain junior World Cups in hockey and football, only qualify when India happens to be the host country, a carve-out tucked into the fine print. The notification carries the signature of Prabhat, additional secretary at the ministry.

Then came the correction. Just 12 days later, on 23rd June, the ministry issued a corrigendum fixing a slip in the English text of the original notification. The cricket clause had referred to the Indian men’s and women’s Cricket World Cup Team, when it should simply have read Cricket Team, since the clause covers all bilateral matches and ICC Tests, not just World Cup fixtures. The corrigendum strikes out the erroneous wording and replaces it with the corrected version, also signed off by Prabhat.

It is a small fix with outsized stakes. Get a clause like this wrong, and broadcasters could argue over whether ordinary bilateral series fall outside the mandatory sharing requirement, a loophole India’s cricket-obsessed viewing public would not forgive easily. The ministry has closed that gap before anyone got the chance to test it, and India’s free-to-air screens will keep their cricket, World Cup or otherwise, exactly where the rules always intended it to be.