Mumbai police claimed on Thursday to have busted a Television Rating Points (TRP) manipulation scam, adding that four people have been arrested in this case.
Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh told reporters that Republic TV, a national television news channel facing criticism for its attack on the Mumbai police and the Maharashtra government in the death of Sushant Singh Rajput, was involved in the crime.
TRP is a tool for judging which TV shows are watched the most and also indicates viewers’ choice and popularity of a particular channel.
The criminal branch of the Mumbai police, which unearthed the TRP scam, arrested the owners of two Marathi channels for manipulating viewership ratings, the official said.
Republic TV is also involved in the TRP scam and those responsible for this will also be arrested, be it a director, promoter or any other employee of the channel, said the police commissioner. The owner of the channel, directors and promoters will also be investigated, he added.
The channel, in a statement, denied Singh’s claims.
The bank accounts of these channels are also being investigated and the police are summoning the people responsible for the TRP fraud to further investigate the case, he said.
“Based on these TRP ratings, advertisers pay to advertise on these channels and it’s a multi-billion rupee game,” Singh said.
The manipulated TRP ratings result in a miscalculated target audience for advertisers, he said, adding that this results in losses of hundreds of million rupees due to such manipulations and false TRP statistics. The TRP is calculated based on the television channel’s audience in a confidential set of households.
Singh said that the people involved in the rampage would bribe people in these homes and ask them to keep some channels on even when they weren’t watching or not at home.
The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) publishes weekly scoring points for television channels in India and its officials are also being questioned in connection with the case, he said.
There are 2,000 barometers installed in Mumbai to monitor TRPs, he said, adding that BARC awarded a contract to an agency called ‘Hansa’ to monitor these barometers.
The two arrested channel owners were presented in court and the Mumbai police obtained their custody, he said. The arrests were made under sections 409 and 420 of the IPC, he added.
“We suspect that if this was happening in Mumbai, it could also be happening in other parts of the country,” he added.
BARC is an industry body created to design, commission, monitor and own an accurate, reliable and timely television audience measurement system and is guided by the recommendations of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Helps provide data points to plan media spend more effectively.
Hansa filed a complaint for TRP fraud, after which a crime was recorded, he said.
“During the investigation it came to light that some former employees of the agency were involved in compromising the data and were sharing it with some television companies,” he said.
These people were revealed to have tampered with the sampling measurement services by inducing barometer users through periodic payments to watch certain television channels, he said.
Many people in whose homes these barometers have been installed have accepted that they were getting a monetary benefit from keeping their televisions on even when they were not watching, the IPS official said.
This apparently was done for “illicit profits” from some television channels and resulted in losses for advertisers and their agencies, he said.
The statement by Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami said that the Mumbai police chief has made false claims against him as the channel had questioned him in the investigation of the Sushant Singh Rajput case.
The news channel said it will file a criminal defamation case against Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh. BARC has not mentioned the channel in even a single complaint, he said, adding that Singh should issue an official apology and prepare to face the channel in court.
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