Republic TV, Fakht Marathi and Box Cinema are under investigation by Mumbai Police for manipulating and committing fraud of TRP Ratings.
What are TRP Ratings?
An organization called BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) an arm of Information and Broadcasting Ministry, Government of India, runs an audience tracking system. This system measures across all consumer segments the television viewing pattern of programs.
They have hired an external research agency named Hansa. Hansa installs television barometers which record how much time a particular household has been watching which channel. These measurement are across the country. Around 40,000 household are selected at random and these barometers installed. The data is then collected and disseminated with the advertising industry.
The media planners, those who want to target a particular demographic viewer then recommend their clients, the advertisers about which channel to choose. This measurement is called as TRP or Television Rating Point. The higher the rating the higher the reach of a channel and the higher is the cost of advertising. A 30,000 Crore broadcast pie gets divided according to this important measure.
The entire process is secret as any manipulation would lead to wrong spending and unlawful gains for the television channel and a loss for the advertiser.
The Complaint
Hansa, the agency that does the data collection recently noticed unusual spike in the number of people watching particular channels. This kind of spike was unprecedented. This created a sense of disquiet in the agency. It started an internal investigation and found that the secrecy of the process had been compromised by some of its own existing staff and some old staff. It registered a complaint against this compromise with the Mumbai Police and became the complainant.
The Investigation
Mumbai police launched an investigation into the complaint and found that prima facie there existed a case. A money trail was available and names of the accused started to tumble out. The money trail led the police to three channels, Fakht Marathi, Box Office Cinema and Republic TV.
Mumbai Police Commissioner Parambir Singh then addressed the media and made the details public.
The Impact
As the crime is being investigated, a few arrests have already been made. The accused have received large deposits into their accounts with one accused having no other income having received as much as 1,00,00,000 (One Crore) into his account.
The modus operandi.
Those who has secret data of Hansa installed a second television set in the target house and connected the barometer to the second television instead of the designated television and asked the residents to leave a particular channel running even if they were not actually watching.
Republic TV was asked to send its CFO to join the investigation but Republic TV, owned by Arnab Goswami, has instead gone to the Supreme Court asking that the crime not be investigated because Mumbai Police has an ulterior motive to defame it.
Earlier Republic TV ran a three month program on the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput, a Bollywood actor who had committed suicide and leveled unsubstantiated allegations against his live in partner Rhea Charkraborty. The channel ran a smear campaign against the Film Industry and painted all actors as drug consumers and traders. It also ran a smear campaign against Mumbai police for having an ulterior motive of proving the ‘murder’ of Sushant Singh Rajput as a suicide.
The channel relegated all other news to the background and ran a ‘Who-Done-It’ conspiracy program. In the process it sidelined all topics that were of importance to the nation and failed to question the central government on the spread of corona, the lack of any action plan, the mass migration of workers, the fall of the economy, the intrusion of China into India and Farm laws which have the north India farmers up in arms.
Republic TV now hides behind a pending case in Supreme Court, which has not even been admitted at the time of writing this article.
This is a developing story. More details will be added later.