Govt asks Trai to finalise guidelines for accreditation of TRP bodies

NEW DELHI: The Indian government is keen to have competition in the television ratings system. Seeking to ensure "fair competition, better standard and quality of services", the government has asked the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to draft recommendations on comprehensive guidelines and accreditation mechanism for agencies involved in measuring television rating points.

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry has asked Trai to come out with guidelines that would ensure that the system contains proper representation and statistically valid sample size of TV homes in both urban and rural areas and all states. It would also ensure third party audit, transparency in selection of people meter homes, secrecy of people meter homes on the panel and grievance redressal mechanism, I&B minister Manish Tewari said.

The Government has also been informed that BARC has taken action to constitute a BARC Advisory High Table.

Meanwhile, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), being established by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, set up a Technical Committee late last month to proceed with the operational tasks for putting a television rating measurement mechanism in place.

Sashi Sinha, IPG Mediabrands India CEO, is the chairman of the BARC technical committee. Paritosh Joshi, strategist at India TV, and Smita Bhosale, head CMI south at Hindustan Unilever, are its other two members.

The Technical Committee has already met a couple of times. "We will give our recommendations to the Barc Board which will take a final decision (on rolling out Barc). We are expected to meet sometime in January," Sinha tells Indiantelevision.com.