DD is the best, rating agency tells minister

Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni was told that Doordarshan-I and DD News — from the stable of the public broadcaster — were the most watched television channels in the country.

Updated on: Aug 26, 2009, 23:36:14 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni was on Wednesday told that Doordarshan-I and DD News — from the stable of the public broadcaster — were the most watched television channels in the country.

Television Audience Measurement (TAM), a private sector company that measures television channels’ reach, revealed this in its presentation to the minister, “Clearing misconceptions about DD”.

Doordarshan, however, had admitted in response to a Right to Information application by Hindustan Times earlier this year that DD-I’s television rating points (TRPs) fell sharply from 1.64 in 2006 to 0.97 during the first nine weeks of 2009.
Despite the fall, DD is still the most watched in India because of its rural reach.

Meanwhile, on another occasion, the minister said — while celebrating the DD’s 50th anniversary — that the challenge before her was to bring the public broadcaster at par with the private channels.

The TAM presentation came at the time when the ministry was considering the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) recommendation of setting up Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) as a self-regulatory body for measuring TRPs.

LK Krishnan, chief executive officer of TAM India, told Soni that movies on DD-I had better reach than premier movie channels like Zee Movies, UTV movies and MAX.

He also said sports on DD caught more eyeballs than other sports channels — when Abhinav Bindra won a gold in Beijing Olympics, among others.

While the DD reached all television homes in India through its terrestrial network, the private channels’ reach was limited to those which can access cables and satellites.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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