Mumbai: The union minister of information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur has said that the I&B ministry will ensure that the recommendations in the TRP committee’s report are implemented swiftly and news channels ratings are brought back to give relief to news broadcasters.

The minister was addressing the News18 India Chaupal summit held on 1-2 December. In conversation with News18 Hindi managing editor Amish Devgan, he said that broadcasters’ associations have shared their comments on the report within the given deadline.

The I&B ministry had reached out to broadcasters in November seeking their comments on the report by 30 November. The 39-page report highlights 20 recommendations to restore faith in the integrity of the TV rating system in India. The TRP committee was formed in response to the TRP scam that broke out in October last year where three TV channels were named by Mumbai Police for allegedly tampering with rating data.

The recommendations were aimed towards strengthening corporate governance at Broadcast Audience Research Council (Barc) India which is the premier TV audience measurement company in the country. There were also recommendations pertaining to the technical, technological, and regulatory aspects of the TV measurement system like the use of return path data (RPD), instituting a regulatory mechanism for media rating agencies, adopting an open data ecosystem, and moving towards a hybrid audience measurement.

The four-member committee included IIT Kanpur professor of the statistics department of mathematics and statistics Dr Shalabh, C-DOT executive director Dr Rajkumar Upadhyay and Decision Sciences Centre for Public Policy professor Pulak Ghosh and led by chairperson and Prasar Bharati chief executive officer Shashi Shekhar Vempati.