Mihir S Sharma: The story of JLF's sponsors

At the Sensex' boom-time peak, in Jan 2008, natural resources and financial firms were quite literally in money

This article has been modified. Please see the clarification at the end of the article. 

Sponsorship tells a story. And, in the case of the Jaipur Literature Festival, the choice of sponsor is itself, frequently, revealing. In past years, the list of location sponsors at the festival has included such firms as Goldman Sachs, Rio Tinto, and Suhel Seth's public-relations and branding firm, Counselage. JLF began in the years of 8%-plus growth, and was nurtured by the expansive, debt-fuelled corporate budgets of those years.

Times have definitely changed since. At the Sensex' boom-time peak, in January 2008, natural resources and financial firms were quite literally in the money. In the subsequent years, mining has been held up by regulatory and political discord, as well as administrative inaction. International finance, of course, retreated somewhat. And the big industrial firms began to hurt, whether thanks to their debt overhang or their stuck projects.

As with the Sensex, so with sponsors. The JLF this year has a new title sponsor: Zee. This is after years of association with the Delhi-based construction conglomerate DSC. The pattern is instructive: an infrastructure company has been replaced by a media giant. Of course, DSC is instead in the news for the collapse of its contract to operate the toll-road between Gurgaon and Delhi, leading to an interesting and illustrative resonance between the problems of governance under UPA-2, corporate over-reach, and the sponsorship of big-name events.

This truth is underlined by reading the list of additional sponsors -- a roll-call that once featured Merrill Lynch-Bank of America and Tata Steel, but now has is almost completely government and consumer-facing multinationals. There isn't a single survivor from the big-spending days before 2011.

The Public Diplomacy division of the ministry of external affairs features as a senior sponsor, as does, for some befuddling reason, the National Jute Board. Google and British Airways lead the list of MNCs. Car companies like Ford, and Mahindra through its association with the humanities centre at Harvard University, also feature. And, finally, there's the British Council and the American Centre, who have subsidised the appearance of writers from those countries.

Sponsorship is a tricky business for both the sponsor and the sponsored. After all, the jute industry is not exactly flooded with support from the government; questions might well be asked whether the Jute Board sponsoring a literature festival makes sense.

Professionally-run companies have to explain themselves to their shareholders. It is likely, though, that the MEA faces fewer such pressures for its choice, given that Foreign Minister Salman Khursheed's wife's book was given a big launch at the festival.

But the sponsored, too, have frequently to explain themselves to their audiences. In the past, JLF has featured writers from dispossessed communities in tents sponsored by Vedanta or Jindal Steel, which caused some people to be up in arms.
Finally, the act of sponsorship isn't guaranteed to be good publicity.

The "official internet partner" of JLF is Vodafone India. But every single Vodafone customer travelling to the festival from outside Jaipur discovered their smartphones' internet did not work. The wireless network in the festival itself was horribly patchy, and broke down with increasing regularity. Naturally, the snazzy Vodafone booth on the lawns was inundated with queries.

When queried online as to why the internet wasn't working for roaming customers at a festival they were sponsoring, a Vodafone official replied that the problem would be fixed in seven working days. Perhaps it will be fixed by 2015's JLF? Either way, Vodafone was on everyone's lips -- and not in a good way. Sponsorship isn't a task to be undertaken lightly.

CLARIFICATION
An earlier version of this article mentioned Vedanta as one of the sponsors of JLF, when it has not sponsored it. The error is regretted.