Centre constituted committee to review guidelines on Television Rating Agency.

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry has constituted a four-member committee so as to review the guidelines on television rating agencies. The committee would be headed by Shashi Shekhar Vempati, the CEO of Prasar Bharati. Other members of the committee include- Dr. Shalabh, Professor of Statistics from IIT Kanpur, Rajkumar Upadhyay, Executive Director of C-Dot and Professor Pulak Ghosh of the Decision Sciences Centre for Public Policy.

Background

This decision was taken by the minitry after the Mumbai police investigations that reveals that some news channels had tampered with the Television Rating Point (TRP).

Highlights

The Ministry have said that the guidelines were issued after detailed analysis by the parliamentary committee. It was also issues based on the recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). These guidelines have been in operation since some years. But, a committee has been constituted to have a fresh look to comply with the recent recommendations of TRAI, for the technological advancements and to further strengthen the procedures for a credible and transparent rating system.

What the committee would do?

The committee would be carrying out an appraisal of the existing system. It will also be examining the TRAI recommendations that will be notified from time to time. Apart from that, It will look after the overall industry scenario and address the needs of the stakeholders.

Television Rating Points (TRPS)

TRPs provide the data about the number of people, socio-economic categories of the people, channels these people watch and the number of times or hours or days or even a weeks people have watched any particular channel. India follows the international standard of one minute for doing the analysis. The data is made public every week. However, the system does not survey the entire country. But, the data analysis is based on what  45,000 households are watching.