NEW DELHI: The Indian government is keen to have competition in the television ratings system. Seeking to ensure "fair competition, better standard and quality of services", the government has asked the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to draft recommendations on comprehensive guidelines and accreditation mechanism for agencies involved in measuring television rating points.

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry has asked Trai to come out with guidelines that would ensure that the system contains proper representation and statistically valid sample size of TV homes in both urban and rural areas and all states. It would also ensure third party audit, transparency in selection of people meter homes, secrecy of people meter homes on the panel and grievance redressal mechanism, I&B minister Manish Tewari said.

The Government has also been informed that BARC has taken action to constitute a BARC Advisory High Table.

Meanwhile, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), being established by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, set up a Technical Committee late last month to proceed with the operational tasks for putting a television rating measurement mechanism in place.

Sashi Sinha, IPG Mediabrands India CEO, is the chairman of the BARC technical committee. Paritosh Joshi, strategist at India TV, and Smita Bhosale, head CMI south at Hindustan Unilever, are its other two members.

The Technical Committee has already met a couple of times. "We will give our recommendations to the Barc Board which will take a final decision (on rolling out Barc). We are expected to meet sometime in January," Sinha tells Indiantelevision.com.

NEW DELHI: Pushed by the government in view of the allegations against TAM, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) is setting up a Technical Committee to proceed with the operational tasks for putting a television rating mechanism measurement mechanism in place.

The Government has also been informed that BARC has taken action to constitute a BARC Advisory High Table.

Giving this information in Parliament today, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said though BARC had been registered in July 2010 under the Companies Act, the recommendations of the Dr Amit Mitra Committee "have not yet been implemented by them".

She said BARC was registered "after constant persuasion by the Government" only after the government consistently pushed the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) which had to set up BARC.

Soni reiterated that the Ministry has been regularly reviewing the progress made by BARC towards setting up a transparent and credible TRP measurement system in India.

In June last year, the Minister had told Parliament that BARC had assured the Government that it would file its first TRP report by July 2013.

The Mitra Committee in its report in November 2010 had said BARC would be the main body and organisations like TAM will function under it for the purpose of ratings.

Soni had then said while accepting the report that the number of peoplemeters could be increased from the present 8,000 to 30,000 in the first stage and at least 50,000 later.