MAM
JioStar names Anvita Thapliyal vice president for content regulation
Disney Star veteran moves to shape compliance, risk and policy at scale
MUMBAI: JioStar has brought in Anvita Thapliyal as vice president, content regulation, sharpening its guardrails as India’s streaming and broadcast markets race ahead under tighter scrutiny.
Thapliyal joins with nearly two decades across television and digital content, straddling creation and compliance in an industry where a single misstep can snowball into regulatory heat. She has most recently led standards and practices at Star India, where she built and ran one of the country’s most established content compliance and risk-mitigation operations across general entertainment, movies and digital platforms.
Her résumé reads like a map of India’s modern media evolution. From supervising fiction at Taurus Telefilms to acquisitions and programming at Palador Pictures, and from content strategy roles at MobilArt and Balaji Telefilms to senior leadership at Disney Star, Thapliyal has worked across the full content lifecycle—development, distribution, monetisation and regulation.
At Disney Star, as director, standards and practices, she led a 30-plus team, drove automation-led change, and crafted content and community policies with a regulatory and brand-safety lens. She also worked closely with creative, sales, marketing and technology teams to pre-empt compliance risks in real time.
Thapliyal has additionally handled large-scale compliance operations for JioHotstar, dealing with the breakneck speed and scale of OTT content. Her expertise spans legal and regulatory compliance across India, South-East Asia, the Middle East and the UK, along with grievance redressal and public-forum governance.
She positions compliance not as censorship but as calibration—balancing artistic freedom with platform integrity, and empathy for creators with accountability to audiences.
As regulators circle closer and platforms grow bigger, JioStar’s bet is clear: in the content gold rush, guardrails are now as valuable as the content itself. And Thapliyal arrives to build them at full throttle.
Brands
Reserve Bank of India cancels Paytm Payments Bank licence
Central bank cites compliance failures; curbs tighten as wind-up looms
MUMBAI: India’s banking watchdog delivered its sharpest blow yet to Paytm Payments Bank, cancelling its licence and effectively ending its ability to operate as a bank under the law.
The Reserve Bank of India said the entity can no longer conduct banking business under the Banking Regulation Act, citing concerns that its affairs were not being run in the interest of depositors or the public and that it had failed to meet licence conditions.
The move escalates a crackdown that has been building for months. The bank had already been barred from onboarding new customers since March 11, 2022, and later faced restrictions on deposits, credit and wallet top-ups. In January 2024, the central bank ordered it to stop accepting fresh deposits, pointing to persistent non-compliance, including lapses in customer due diligence, use of funds and technology systems.
Operationally, the bank is now on a tight leash. It may process withdrawals of existing deposits and facilitate loan referrals through banking correspondents, but it cannot take fresh deposits.
The central bank said it would apply to the high court to wind up the bank.
Paytm sought to ringfence the fallout. In a regulatory filing, it said the licence cancellation applies to Paytm Payments Bank Limited, a separate entity, and should not be attributed to One 97 Communications. It added that there is no exposure or material business arrangement with the bank and that it operates independently, without Paytm’s board or management involvement.
“As informed earlier, Paytm (One 97 Communications Limited) and its services, which have been operating without interruption, will continue to operate uninterrupted. These include the Paytm app, Paytm UPI, Paytm Gold and all other services offered by its subsidiaries and associated companies,” the company said.
The distinction may reassure users of the app ecosystem, but the regulator’s verdict is unequivocal. After years of warnings, caps and curbs, the payments bank experiment at Paytm is being shut down—decisively, and with little room left to manoeuvre.
