MUMBAI: In a handwritten statement to Mumbai Police, the former CEO of Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India, Partho Dasgupta said that he has received US$12,000 from Arnab Goswami, the Editor-in-Chief of Republic TV for two separate holidays and a total of Rs 40 lakh for manipulating ratings in favour of the news channel.
According to reports, The 3,600-page supplementary charge sheet, filed by Mumbai Police also includes names several news channels, including Republic, Times Now and Aaj Tak, and lists instances of alleged manipulation as well as "pre-fixing" of ratings for the channels by BARC's top executives.
Earlier, Arnab Goswami allegedly gained illegal access to an additional 22 million users of Prasar Bharati-owned direct-to-home (DTH) service, DD FreeDish, without paying the government for it.
Goswami's Republic TV also dodged an auction process which requires channels to shell out Rs 8-12 crore yearly as carriage fees for a slot. His news channel was broadcast for over two years in an unencrypted form on a bandwidth accessible to all users of the FreeDish service.
This alleged illegal access has caused a loss to the exchequer and provided Goswami with an unfair advantage enjoyed by Republic. It was brought to the notice of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) by competitors, and the complaint was forwarded to Prasar Bharati.
The practice, however, continued till September 2019, when a private DTH service, Dish TV, with which Republic had a deal for broadcast began to encrypt the channel. Republic TV had carriage deals with a few private DTH players, including Dish TV, which owns bandwidth on the GSAT15 satellite for retransmission of TV channels. Because the satellite is also used by DD FreeDish, Dish TV's bandwidth is co-located with DD Free-Dish's. This resulted in Dish TV users getting all free-to-air (FTA) channels available on FreeDish without any extra cost.
With Mumbai Police's probe into the alleged TRP manipulation scam, the matter has come into focus once again and a supplementary charge-sheet was filed, with an attachment of WhatsApp and email conversations between Goswami, former Broadcast Audience Research Council CEO Partho Dasgupta and others.
According to the chats, Dasgupta informed Goswami of Prasar Bharati's reply to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB). Dasgupta sent a text to Goswami saying, "Apparently there is some complaint about Republic in ministry — it's yet to be referred to us — one JS told – but I think it will never come," insinuating that he received the information from a joint secretary.