The ninth Asian Games in 1982 kickstarted a color TV revolution in India. Till then Indians had to make do with black and white sets from companies like Weston and Nelco. But the then government was keen to make the Quadrennial sporting event, being held in Delhi for the second time, a symbol of India’s rising stature in the world and decided that its excitement deserved to be viewed in colour.

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An overnight cabinet decision allowed for the import of 50,000 colour television sets by November 1982, solely for the purpose of the Asiad. As it turned out many more were finally imported as users didn’t mind paying the 190 percent duty imposed on imported TV sets from places like Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai. It also helped that the booming sales spelt a custom duty bonanza for the government.

Even then, it was tough going. By the time the decision was taken, the games were close at hand. The problem was that the national broadcaster Doordarshan just didn’t have the wherewithal for telecast in colour. It then became a race against time as Doordarshan had less than a year and half to procure the equipment including the Outside Broadcasting (OB) vans and the cameras and then train engineers to man these.

Eventually, only three of the games venues, the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the Indraprastha Stadium and the Talkatora Swimming Pool could provide color coverage. Perhaps as well since that meant the hockey finals which India lost ignominiously to Pakistan at the Shivaji Stadium was shown in black & white.

But even the limited coverage achieved its purpose. Indians, exposed to this new colourful world on their screens at home, wanted more such movies, entertainment and sports. By 1984, the floodgates were open as Indian consumers happily put down Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000 for colour TV sets. Companies like Bush, Onida, Videocon and Televista, Weston set up new assembling units and by 1988 they were producing nearly three million such sets a year as the government did it bit by giving licenses liberally. Even the public sector Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) had a waitlist of thousands for its models.

It had taken less than 25 years from the time television was introduced in the country on September 15, 1959, in Delhi, for it to go coloured. The programming boom that followed with soaps like Hum Log, Buniyaad along with mythological dramas like Ramayana and Mahabharata was thanks largely due to the technological changes that Doordarshan carried out at the back end along with a massive expansion of its network. While in the first decade almost 80 percent of the components were imported, by the 1990s companies like Samtel Colour and Videocon had set up sophisticated plants to manufacture colour picture tubes in the country.

—Sundeep Khanna is a former editor and the co-author of the recently released Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions. Views are personal

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(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)

First Published:Dec 6, 2021 5:43 PM IST