New pricing regime for non-CAS areas

Your monthly cable charge in a non-addressable system may be fixed irrespective of the number of pay channels added to your television set, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 21, 2007, 21:11:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Your monthly cable charge in a non-addressable system may be fixed irrespective of the number of pay channels added to your television set.

This is what the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has suggested in a consultation paper released on Monday. The paper is not applicable to areas under the addressable system - south Delhi - popularly known as CAS zone.

The suggestion is aimed to plug a loophole in the last tariff order, where the cable operators were allowed to increase the monthly cable charges, when a new pay channel was introduced or an existing Free To Air channel converted into a pay channel.

The regulator found that since December, 2003, as many as 24 new pay channels were introduced and 36 free to air became pay channels. To accommodate new pay channels, the cable operators used to flush out free to air channels, thus hiking the monthly cable rates. There was a provision in the earlier tariff order to hike the cable bill over the ceiling fixed by the regulator for new pay channels.

The regulator has now suggested a ceiling on monthly cable bill, irrespective of the pay channels shown, for consumers to curb this practice. The regulator says it would help the subscriber to be clear about the maximum amount a cable operator can charge from him. But, it would not mean that the consumer would have to pay this amount. "The consumer can still end up paying less than the ceiling depending on the number of bouquets he or she selects," the paper says.

The paper also suggests a uniform rate to watch television across the non-CAS areas, if consumers’ select similar channels. There is no such uniformity in cable rates as of now, the regulator said.

The paper raised the issue of enlisting price of each individual channel, rather than having a price for the entire bouquet. Number of consumers had complained to the regulator that they have to watch unwarranted channels because cable operators force them to of bouquets. The regulator, however, says this issue cannot be tackled in absence of an addressable system.

The paper also talks about the issue of disputes between cable operators and multi-service operators (MSOs) on the number of consumers the operators have.

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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