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indiantelevision.com Team
NEW DELHI: Around eighty stakeholders attended the fourth open house on media ownership held today at Bhubaneswar, with a large number of local multi-system operators (MSOs) and cable operators complaining that no time was given for persons from all over the state to come to the state capital to attend the meet.
However, officials of the telecom regulatory authority of India (Trai) claimed that a fruitful discussion was held on the subject under discussion. The meet was addressed on behalf of Trai by principal advisor N Parameswaran and advisor Rajkumar Upadhyay.
Parameswaran told indiantelevision.com that the gathering included around fifty LCOs who gave valuable suggestions.
With the open houses on media ownership getting disrupted by cable operators insisting their issues be take up and a large majority of participants feeling Indian media is run by a handful of large media house, Trai had planned two additional open houses before finalising its report.
The next open house will be held in Indore at the Ravindra Natya Griha. The earlier open houses were in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad dominated by cable operators, and in Delhi.
Asked about the short notice for the last two meets, a Trai official said that advertisements were placed in local newspapers in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh apart from the notice on the Trai website.
In the Delhi meet, Trai chairman Rahul Khullar - while disagreeing with a representative of a large media house who denied that just three or four media houses controlled the entire fourth estate - said "There is a large body of Indian citizens who feel that way. Wake up and smell the coffee."
All the earlier open houses have been held this month and the one on 18 May in Delhi was held amidst heavy police arrangements.
Trai had set 29 April as the last date for stakeholders to offer their cross-comments on a consultation paper on the subject. The paper had been issued on 15 February but the final date had been extended in view of the ?complexity of the issue?.
The paper among other issues has sought comments on devising ownership rules for vertical integration between broadcasting and distribution entities.
The paper will also devise rules/restrictions in case of mergers and acquisitions in the media sector, and media ownership rules within and across media segments.
Methodology to measure ownership or control of an entity over a media outlet, identification of genres to be considered while framing media ownership rules, and prescribing norms for mandatory disclosures by media entities are some other issues.
Trai has also discussed in its paper issues relating to identification of media segments wherein media ownership rules are to be prescribed, and identification of relevant markets for evaluating various parameters to be used for devising ownership rules and the methodology for measuring these parameters.
At the outset, Trai - which had issued a paper on the same issue some years earlier - said the paper had been issued at the request of the I&B ministry earlier last year following a report of the Administrative Staff College of India, in Hyderabad.
Trai said that it was felt that reasonable restrictions may need to be put in place on ownership in the media sector, to ensure media pluralism and to counter the ills of monopolies. It pointed out that such restrictions do exist in many international markets.
