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The Cabinet has tightened the criteria for starting new television channels. The purpose is to weed out non-serious players, both news and non-news. Norms have also been tightened for starting any additional channel.
A senior official of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry told Business Line , “The new norms will become effective immediately . Even those who have applied, but have not yet got the licence will be required to follow these norms.” A statement issued by the Ministry explained the decision as intended to ensure only serious and credible operators are permitted to operate TV channels.
Under the new norms, net worth criteria for up-linking of ‘News and Current Affairs, Non-News and Current Affairs' and down-linking of the ‘foreign channels' has been raised up to over six times ( See chart ). For teleports, the net worth criteria would be uniform irrespective of the channel capacity. The net worth criteria will remain Rs 3 crore for the first teleport and Rs 1 crore for every additional teleport. All TV channels will be required to operationalise their TV channels within one year from the date of permission. The News and Current Affairs channels will have to give a performance bank guarantee for Rs 2 crore while for Non-News and Current Affairs channels it will be Rs 1 crore. If the channels fail to start within the stipulated time, the guarantee will be forfeited and permission cancelled.
The permission fee for uplinking or downlinking of TV channels and setting up of teleports would be Rs 2 lakh a channel/teleport per annum. The permission fee for downlinking of TV channels uplinked from India would be Rs 5 lakh a channel per annum. The permission fee for downlinking of TV channels uplinked from abroad would be Rs 15 lakh a channel per annum.
Commenting on the new policy, Mr Sanjay K. Das, Senior Vice-President, Media Guru Consultants, “It is a much needed move as there were practically no entry barriers for setting up a television channel. With the licence fee at Rs 10 lakh or so and the existing norms stipulating just a net worth of Rs 1.5 crore for uplinking of non-news channels and Rs 3 crore for news channels, the entry norms were so low that the general industry standard was suffering.”
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