DD’s auditors have more cases than the CBI

Twenty-two pending audit objections raised by DD’s own auditors, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) were discussed. Among them were objections raised against DD bosses giving injudicious contracts to private producers, undue benefits given to sponsors and losses suffered due to non-realisation of revenue and non-utilisation of expensive equipment.

Four of these dealt with specific sports contracts not taken up by the CBI in the present case while eight dealt with specific programme contracts bagged by private producers.

Doordarshan’s Financial Advisor Dr P K Seth, who has also been named in CBI’s FIRs, admitted that “poor documentation and fiscal management” were behind this auditing mess. “The problem is that Doordarshan has to perform a balancing act in its role as a public broadcaster,” he said, breaking his silence after the November 13 raids. “Often financial considerations have to be sacrificed for commercial and telecast considerations as it was done in some of these sports contracts.”

He confirmed that all the deals under the CBI’s scrutiny were on their list of pending audit objections and had been taken up at monthly review meetings, even at the level of the Cabinet Secretary.

“If the CBI is going to convert into losses all the un-recovered money, then Doordarshan has lost big money even in its coverage of the Sydney Olympics and this year’s French Open tournament,” he said. What could described as losses to the national exchequer incurred during these telecasts amounted to Rs 7.5 crore (since only the minimum bank guarantee was recovered) and Rs 2 crore, respectively.

Besides these two deals, the I&B Ministry’s list of audit objections reveals at least four instances of coverage of international sports events that caused huge losses to the broadcaster. (See box)

After last months’s review of unsettled audit objections, Doordarshan had been directed in writing “to avoid unnecessary audit criticism regarding the allocation of slots for various programmers, efforts should be made to create in-built safeguards in the agreements entered into with the parties so that the areas of discretion are well-defined in the agreements themselves.”

Unfortunately for the DD bosses, the match-fixing scam and the consequential release of the Arun Agarwal report on the functioning of the sports consortium brought the apparent fiscal mismanagement into public preview. There were frantic efforts to dig out the old contracts and reconcile losses even as the CBI was scrutinising documents seized during the searches at 25 places in connection with the five deals.

As G Achari, CBI’s Special Director, put it: “In terms of losses caused to the public exchequer by a Government undertaking, this has become a very big case for us. It is also quite complicated since international parties are involved and may need sustained investigation abroad to expose the nexus between the Doordarshan officials and the private parties.”

Cases not on CBI list
I&B Ministry’s list of audit objections included four instances of coverage of international sports events that caused huge losses:
*Loss of Rs 16.24 lakh during coverage of the BSI World Masters Cricket Tournament.
*Unrecovered revenue from the Indira Gandhi International hockey match in 1995. Figured not known even after five years.
*A list of unreconciled figures prepared last year admitted that DD accepted a lower bid from an advertising agency for exclusive rights for the four-nation cricket tournament and the US Open tennis tournament, causing a loss of Rs 6.82 crore.
*For the 1994 World Cup Hockey tournament, Doordarshan did not claim Rs 42 lakh from Nimbus Communications and did not even recover the minimum guarantee of Rs 10.25 lakh.