Bengal to regularise cable TV biz

The Mamata Banerjee government is poised to enact a law aimed at regularising the burgeoning cable TV operators’ business in the state. A committee is now busy finalising the report that will be shortly sent to the chief minister.

According to the West Bengal Cable TV Network Development & Welfare Committee, the government is “actively considering” the enactment of a regulatory mechanism. It is meant to regulate the entire cable TV operators’ business, while protecting the interest of the consumers, says its chairman, Debashish Bhattacharjee.

The panel was formed by the chief minister in June. It has conducted a study of the market, interacted with the associations of cable TV operators and met the representatives of the multi-system operators (MSOs).

The committee has six journalists from the electronic media. The secretaries of information & culture, home, finance, labour, law and industry are also its members, while the chairman is also a mediaperson.

The findings of the committee show that the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority’s area alone has 2.8 million homes having cable TV connections. The number of cable operators doing business in this area is 10,000.

The number of cable TV operators in the state is 30,000. There are 400,000 people directly or indirectly employed in the industry. The cable operators came into the scene in 1991 in the wake of the first Gulf war, when CNN first made its presence felt in the metropolis, showing live footage of the war.

Initially there were only cable operators in the state. The MSOs first arrived on the scene in 1996. Now, the state has 15 major MSOs. The prominent ones are Siti Digital, Manthan, Digicable and GTPL. Despite the advent of the technology, the penetration of direct-to-home services in the market is merely nine per cent, thus lending it a trend of monopoly where the MSOs have the final say. 

To break the MSOs’ stranglehold over the pricing of the carriage fee of the channels, the committee has recommended a fee structure which the government might enforce on them. “The question of market principles does not arise here,” says Bhattacharjee. “The government does fix the fares of buses and taxis, as these are governed under the Public Vehicles Act. Likewise, once the government enacts regulation for television cable operators, the carriage fee will also come under the purview of the government.”

The proposed regulation will force all the MSOs and the cable operators to register them with the department of information and culture and they will have to declare their area of coverage. The channels will have to deposit the carriage fees with the same department and the government will forward the sum after deducting 10 per cent as tax. “The arm-twisting, which is the regular practice now (by the MSOs) would be stopped by this regulation,” hopes Bhattacharjee.