I&B Ministry
400 cable operators demonstrate outside I&B Ministry
NEW DELHI: Senior officials of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry met members of the Indian Broadcast Foundation (IBF) and the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) along with other stakeholders to discuss hurdles in the way of digitisation of cable television.
The discussion primarily centered on carriage fee and the format of agreements between the various stakeholders including subscribers.
The broadcasters were emphatic that carriage fee should be done away with it. Senior officials including joint secretary (broadcasting) Sanjay Murthy agreed to consider the various issues that were raised at the meeting.
A ministry source told indiantelvision.com that the meeting was part of a series that was being organised to ensure smooth switch over to digital addressable systems.
Around 400 local cable operators, who are members of Cable Operators Welfare Federation (COWF) demonstrated outside Shastri Bhavan, which houses the ministry, to gain entry and express their point of view at the meeting. Around 150 of them were later detained by the police and taken to Parliament Street police station where they were later let off.
The ministry source, however, said that local cable operators (LCOs) who are the members of the taskforce had been invited to the meeting but only one of them had attended.
MUMBAI: When the numbers go silent, the noise on screen gets a little harder to measure. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has extended the suspension of television rating data for news channels, directing Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to withhold TRPs for another four weeks. The latest order, issued on March 31, 2026, builds on an earlier directive from March 6 that had paused ratings for a month. The ministry has clarified that the blackout will continue for four weeks or until further instructions are issued whichever comes earlier keeping the industry in a prolonged state of data drought.
The reasoning, officials suggest, lies far beyond domestic screens. With geopolitical tensions in West Asia continuing to escalate, the government has flagged concerns over how such developments could influence news consumption and presentation. The move is aimed at curbing excessive sensationalism and speculative coverage during what it describes as a sensitive global moment.
For the broadcast ecosystem, the absence of Television Rating Points (TRPs) is more than symbolic, it removes the industry’s primary scorecard. Ratings dictate advertising flows, shape editorial strategies and fuel the competitive pecking order among news channels. Without them, broadcasters are effectively operating without a public performance benchmark.
The timing only adds to the complexity. Amid a high-intensity global news cycle, channels must now navigate audience engagement without the weekly feedback loop that typically drives programming decisions. Advertisers, too, are left recalibrating, leaning on proxies such as brand strength, reach and distribution instead of hard viewership data.
While framed as a temporary regulatory intervention tied to maintaining public order, the extended suspension underscores a broader unease about the tone and direction of news coverage. For now, the ratings race is on pause but the battle for attention continues, just without a scoreboard.
