Measuring the new ratings proposal mess

MUMBAI: India’s television advertising market is worth upwards of Rs 30,000 crore a year. Every rupee of it flows from a single number: the rating. For a decade that number has been, at best, unreliable and, at worst, for sale. In 2020 Mumbai Police arrested people for bribing households to watch certain channels. The regulator’s response was to commission a review. In March 2026 the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting finally published it. The new policy is serious, overdue and in places badly designed.

Start with what it gets right. The panel of metered homes that generates India’s ratings has been embarrassingly small: roughly 40,000 households for a country of 300 million TV viewers. The new rules require existing agencies to double it within six months and to keep expanding until 1.2 lakh homes are covered. A quarter of that panel must rotate every year, removing the semi-permanent fixtures that made gaming the system so easy. Landing-page viewership, a brazen trick by which channels counted captive eyeballs on DTH home screens as active watching is banned. Surprise government inspections are in. So are quarterly audits. The policy also, for the first time, requires ratings to cover OTT platforms and connected televisions alongside cable and satellite. In a market where advertising money is rapidly migrating to streaming, a measurement framework that ignores streaming is not a framework at all.

The ambition is right. The execution is where things get uncomfortable.

The cost alone is daunting. Doubling the panel requires roughly Rs 130–180 crore in hardware, plus another Rs 80–120 crore a year in field operations. The mandatory annual survey of 8–12 lakh households to calibrate the panel adds Rs 35–60 crore. Governance restructuring, technology upgrades and audit fees pile on further. All told, the recurring cost of compliance perhaps Rs 150–230 crore a year likely exceeds what Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), the only operating ratings agency, currently earns in revenue. The entire bill will be passed to subscribers through higher rate cards. Broadcasters will pay because they must. Advertisers will pay when, and only when, they are convinced the data is better. OTT platforms particularly the subscription-funded ones like Netflix and Amazon, which have no advertising GRPs to sell will resist, and nothing in the policy compels them to co-operate.

There is a deeper irony in the OTT mandate. The ministry wants technology-neutral ratings, which is sensible. But the methodology it mandates meters in homes is precisely not technology-neutral. Roughly 85–90 per cent of streaming in India happens on mobile devices outside the metered home. A policy that demands cross-platform measurement while specifying a single-screen measurement technique is ambitious about the destination and confused about the vehicle.

The governance clauses are more troubling still. Every senior appointment at a ratings agency chief executive, chief technology officer, finance director requires prior approval from the ministry. Security clearances must be obtained from the Ministry of Home Affairs. The government reserves the right to take over the agency’s operations without notice in a national emergency. These provisions treat a commercial data business as strategic infrastructure, which it arguably is; but they also mean that global measurement firms Nielsen, Kantar, Ipsos would have to submit their senior leadership to an Indian government vetting process before taking up their posts. None of them face this condition in any other market. Combined with FDI rules that the ministry has declined to publish alongside the rest of the policy, the framework politely but firmly tells foreign capital to wait outside.

The result is a regulatory design that cannot, in practice, support more than one compliant player. Entry costs exceed Rs 200 crore before a single rating is published. Registration cannot be transferred if a business fails. A fourth guideline violation within a year triggers cancellation existential for any operating agency, catastrophic for the advertising market that depends on continuous ratings delivery. BARC, a consortium of broadcasters and advertisers, is structurally favoured to remain the sole certified measurer of India’s television audiences. Natural monopolies in measurement are perilous. They concentrate systemic risk, invite regulatory capture and, when they fail, fail completely.

The ministry would object that BARC’s failures under the 2014 framework demanded exactly this level of intervention. It is not wrong. The old rules had no teeth; the manipulation they failed to prevent was real and documented. The question is not whether stronger oversight was necessary. It is whether the ministry is the right body to provide it. India has built credible independent regulators before SEBI for securities markets, TRAI for telecoms where boards drawn from industry, government and civil society provide oversight without operational control. A ratings regulator structured on those lines would achieve the transparency objectives without giving a single ministry both the power to approve every hire and the power to switch off the entire measurement system.

That is the framework the 2026 policy does not build. What it builds instead is tighter, cleaner and more serious than what came before but it leaves India’s television currency dependent on one agency, overseen by one ministry, in a market that deserves something more robustly independent than that.