Two more channels, News Network Channel and Mahaamovie, have also been included in the scope of the investigation on manipulation of audience figures. The sources said the additional IPC sections were added after Republic TV, one of the channels under scan, refused to release the information requested by the police.
Police had sought details about an internal report prepared by Hansa Research and the Broadcasting Audience Research Council (BARC) surveillance team, which aired on the channel on October 10. To measure TRPs, BARC had installed people meters in the houses to select audiences.
BARC had awarded the barometer monitoring contract to Hansa Research. The Police added articles 179 (refusing to answer the public servant authorized to question), 174 (non-attendance in obedience to a public servant order), 201 (causing the disappearance of evidence of the crime or giving false information to the offender’s screen) and 204 (destruction of document to avoid its production as evidence) of the IPC.
Previously, the police had registered the FIR in the sections of the IPC related to cheating, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy. A police officer said: “Some of these sections have been added due to lack of cooperation from channel officials who have been summoned and requested to present documents.”
The police have been investigating the role of three channels, Republic TV, Fakt Marathi and Box Cinema, to inflate the audience figures. Meanwhile, statements by Republic TV CFO Shiva Sundaram, its head of distribution Ghanshyam Singh and executive editor Niranjan Narayanswamy were recorded by police on Wednesday.
Sundaram has been asked to reappear on Thursday. Priya Mukherjee, Republic TV’s chief operating officer, is also likely to join the investigations Thursday. The two former Hansa Research employees, Dinesh Vishwakarma and Ramji Verma, arrested by the criminal branch on Tuesday (two former Hansa employees were detained before that) were presented before the 37th metropolitan magistrate on Wednesday and remained in police custody until October 23.
In the request for pre-trial detention, the police said that Verma and Vishwakarma had said that agents from the News Network Channel and Mahaamovie used to pay them to manipulate the TRPs. “We want to investigate and unearth the entire conspiracy. We also want to know how many more Hansa Research Relationship Managers were involved in the scam and examine the flow of money in the bank accounts of Umesh Mishra (another arrested defendant) and Verma, ”the pretrial request said.
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