Supreme Court tells JioStar to take TRAI pricing fight back to Delhi High Court

MUMBAI: The Supreme Court has pressed pause on JioStar India Pvt Ltd’s attempt to shift its long-running battle over the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) television pricing regime.

Instead, the country’s highest court has sent the broadcaster back to where the dispute began more than a decade ago, the Delhi High Court., according to a report in Mint.

A bench comprising chief justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana on Tuesday disposed of JioStar’s transfer petition, advising the company to place its objections before the Delhi High Court. The broadcaster was represented by law firm Karanjawala & Co.

At the heart of the dispute is TRAI’s regulatory architecture governing television channel pricing, including tariff orders, maximum retail price (MRP) caps and discount structures for cable and direct-to-home (DTH) platforms. JioStar argues that the framework is a tightly woven package and cannot be pulled apart thread by thread.

Appearing for the broadcaster, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi argued that the regulations and tariff orders were issued simultaneously and should be treated as one integrated scheme, despite flowing from different legal powers.

He submitted that while TRAI regulations constitute delegated legislation and therefore fall within a high court’s jurisdiction, tariff orders are administrative decisions that are challengeable before the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT).

“A tariff order and a regulation were issued simultaneously. One was in the exercise of legislative power and the other in the exercise of administrative power,” Rohatgi told the court.

Rohatgi also took aim at TRAI’s definition of a “subscriber”, arguing that the regulator has bundled luxury hotels and ordinary households into the same pricing basket.

His contention was simple: a five-star hotel monetising television signals should not pay the same tariff as a family watching television at home.

“We say that if a hotel is charging Rs 50,000 per room, there has to be a distinction between commercial exploitation of a signal and a residential household. You cannot have the same tariff. It is like comparing apples with oranges,” he argued.

JioStar had originally approached the Delhi High Court in 2014 and 2015, challenging both TRAI’s regulations and tariff orders. Those petitions remained in limbo as related issues arising from proceedings before TDSAT were already pending before the Supreme Court.

The broadcaster has maintained that the Delhi High Court later directed it to amend its petitions and imposed costs, even though it believed no amendments were warranted.For now, the Supreme Court has declined to redraw the legal map. The ball, it said in effect, is back in the Delhi High Court’s court, leaving JioStar’s decade-old tussle with TRAI very much alive and the television tariff saga far from its final episode