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Hyderabad: Telugu TV artists and technicians in Andhra Pradesh are demanding that regional entertainment channels should stop airing dubbed serials as they are deprived of work.

The artists and technicians have held protests like fasts in support of their cause and the issue took a serious turn when some of them allegedly attacked the office of a popular Telugu entertainment channel a few days ago.

The protesters alleged that the channel did not pay heed to their demand, and the attackers ended up behind bars over the incident.

The complaint of the TV artistes is that the dubbed serials like 'Balika Vadhu' (originally made in Hindi), which have become hugely popular with the audience, have thrown them out of work as not many serials are made in Telugu.

"Scores of TV artists, producers and others have lost their livelihood due to the onslaught of dubbed serials. We have been protesting against this, but nothing concrete has come for us so far," Suresh, a leader of the TV artists association, said.

As the artists held sit-ins, with one of them undertaking an indefinite fast, some channels have responded positively and promised to encourage local soaps, but many channels still continue to show dubbed ones, the artists alleged.

Besides rendering the local artists and technicians jobless, the dubbed serials also hurt local language and culture, they asserted.

Veteran filmmaker and former Union Minister Dasari Narayana Rao and the Movie Artists Association (MAA) in Andhra Pradesh have extended their support to the demand of the local artistes and technicians.

The Telugu TV industry has been successful with soaps being made in the regional language until the dubbed serials gained upper hand.

It has been the complaint of local film and TV producers and artists for long against movies and television content dubbed from other languages like Tamil, Hindi and English.

The dubbed versions caused losses to the producers and made the artists go without work, they complained.

PTI