There's commerce. And then, there's commerce. That's the distinction India's Supreme Court seems to have gone by when it ordered Ten Sports to offer a live feed of the coverage of the India-Pakistan cricket series to state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan (DD). For those who came in late, in 2002 Dubai-based Taj Television, the company that owns Ten Sports paid the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), $45 million (Rs 216-crore at then exchange rates) for terrestrial, cable, and direct-to-home television rights for all matches organised by the board till 2007. Circa 2004, the company was hoping to leverage the historic series, the first played by India in Pakistan in 15 years to bolster its sagging subscriptions. Only, Ten Sports seemed to have discounted Doordarshan's clout and a 1995 ruling by the Supreme Court. The public service broadcaster raised the issue of public interest, and the court's interim order is in keeping with the spirit of its February 9, 1995 judgement, where it stated that a monopoly over broadcasting, whether by the government or by anybody else was inconsistent with citizens' right to free speech.

Does public interest matter more than private contractual obligations? It looks like it does. It is the spirit behind several global declarations, including the World Trade Organisation's Doha Declaration on trips (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights) and Public Health. Sections 4 and 6 of the declaration allow countries to overlook patents in the interests of public health. The provision was most recently used by Kenya to procure azithromycin, a new generation antibiotic on which Pfizer holds the patent. Health is one thing, entertainment, another, although there is a school of thought that, in India cricket is at once, both a religion and a drug (opium of the masses, silly).

The government, clearly, buys that argument; it threw its weight behind Doordarshan, although the channel is owned by Prasar Bharti, a corporatised and ostensibly autonomous corporation. As this magazine goes to press, the government is also considering a law that will allow DD to telecast events of national importance, irrespective of issues related to rights and ownership. Government's continually intervene in broadcast-related issues.

As recently as December 2003, the European Union convinced Europe's Premier League Football Association to force BSkyB, the company with exclusive rights to all Premier League matches till 2007 (what's it with 2007?) to part with some to a rival broadcaster. The move is ostensibly targetted at breaking Sky Sports' (BSkyB's sports channel) monopoly on European soccer and ensuring choice for European subscribers who do not subscribe to the DTH (direct to home) offering from the Murdoch-stable . And even the format for Premier League, post 2007, is being altered to include at least two competing broadcasters.

''The (Supreme Court's) ruling has damaged our business, especially the every-day distribution-driven one,'' says Chris McDonald, CEO, Taj Television. For, while the court has directed DD to deposit Rs 50 crore in lieu of damages that could be suffered by Ten Sports, the channel believes the actual loss could be over Rs 200 crore. Worse, the free availability of the telecast will hurt its chances of increasing its subscription base.

Some broadcasters believe Ten Sports erred in not understanding the significance of the series. ''The 1995 Supreme Court judgement puts airwaves as public property, and one has to respect public sentiment,'' says Kunal Dasgupta, CEO, Sony Entertainment Television India. ''Why, even we offer India-specific matches to DD first,'' says the man who shelled out a whopping $225 million (Rs 1,035 crore) to International Cricket Council for television rights of all ICC-organised tournaments till 2007.

If Indian courts classify cricket as 'public interest' and condone, even sanction, the flouting of an international corporate contract, then the Indian government will not have a leg to stand on if US courts override private outsourcing contracts citing the same 'public interest'. Maybe it is time for the government to respect the complete 1995 order of the Supreme Court and create a regulatory environment that balances public interest with the profit-minded motives of companies.

NEWSMAKER
Ramesh Gelli, 58

Ramesh Gelli: On how to be talk to the town

Here's a sure-fire recipe to make the news. Step 1: Rejoin the board of the company you founded after quitting it under a cloud. Step 2: Drop hints about your desire to enter politics. Step 3: Create a turnaround fund with a corpus of Rs 100 crore. Step 4: Resign from the board, again. Step 5: Say, "Politics? Who? Me?". The only caveat: everything has to happen in the span of a month. That's exactly what Ramesh Gelli has done. His decision to re-resign from the board of Global Trust Bank-he founded it in 1994, still holds a 20 per cent stake in it, and his son Girish Gelli sits on the board-was prompted, he insists, by the need to devote more time to the turnaround fund which has, if he is to be believed, taken on a life of its own. "The earlier plan was to get it up and running by September, October," says Gelli. "Now, I think we may be able to make it operational by June, July; we have received three serious proposals from investors keen to participate (in the fund) and six requests seeking assistance." Once among the most respected bankers in the country, Gelli believes "genuine entrepreneurs and good projects" sometimes flounder "for want of appropriate management inputs or funds". So, is it curtains for his short-lived flirtation with politics? Not really says Gelli. "In my view, the Rajya Sabha route may be more suited to professionals; I could consider that if I find any party seeing room for professionals." But, as the man himself adds, "the Rajya Sabha is an opportunity only after the elections''. Is Chandrababu Naidu listening?

-E. Kumar Sharma

IT's Next Wave
Business Process management is it.

Business process management (BPM) is the new buzzword in it. Ahem! Wasn't it called Business Process re-engineering in the early nineties? Yes it was, and it meant overhauling all of a company's processes, documenting them in thick spiral-bound volumes, and spending the next three years encoding them into new it systems.

Many companies are now re-organising themselves as processes (and sub-processes) and digitising these into workflows. The advantage? You can take one process at a time and effect change. ''At the height of the dotcom boom, companies were scared of getting Amazoned. But now they are more in danger of getting General Electrified,'' say authors Howard Smith and Peter Fingar in their book Business Process Management, the Third Wave, holding up GE-the company has boosted its spending on it even as other companies have slashed theirs, convinced that its efforts at digitising business processes would pay off big in the future-as the (repeat: the) company to emulate.

BPM will be the setting for the next big battle in the IT domain: Microsoft, IBM and even Infosys will compete for a foothold in the space. Some say this is the next big change in enterprise software after relational databases.

We concur.

-Vidya Viswanathan

GOOD NEWS
Biocon B(l)oom

» The government allows Non-Resident Indians to invest in its new pension scheme targeted at both the organised and the unorganised sector.

» The public issue of India's premier biotech company Biocon is oversubscribed almost 33 times.

» The index for six core infrastructure industries registers a 11.3 per cent growth, year-on-year, in February 2004.

-Ashish Gupta

CHIPTALK
IT's RFID Wind

Benoit Gaucherin: Hearlding a new revolution

When software services companies start talking about a new technology, you know it is more than vapourware. So, when Benoit Gaucherin, the CTO of it services company, Sapient, held forth recently on RFID (radio frequency ID) tags, one listened. These chips, which have antennae that can be read and written onto by a computer that bounces radio waves a few meters, are now cheap enough to be tagged on to just about anything-from airline baggage to a carton of milk to tyres to hospital patients.

In fact, Michelin has already taken to tagging its tyres to respond better to a Ford/Firestone-like situation. In other words, what we are talking about is a supply chain revolution, where data is made available real time. "Wal-Mart already requires its 100 major supplies to tag containers with these chips by 2005," says Gaucherin, who has been working alongwith RFID start-ups such as Embrace and ThingMagic for the last two years.

All this, of course, means several processes change and that translates to a lot of work for the IT services companies. Do we see the Infosys and Wipros laughing all the way to the bank?

-Vidya Viswanathan