The TLDR: The Mumbai police filed over 1,000 (unverified) pages of WhatsApp conversations as part of its case against the former CEO of Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), Partho Dasgupta—which included extended chit chat with his best bro Arnab Goswami. The Gossip Girls of the TV industry appear to have traded confidential information and illegal favours, and (far more dangerously) talked smack about BJP ministers. The big picture—of a cosy nexus of politicians, news titans and industry heads—is damning, but hardly surprising.

First, BARC explained

BARC: is an industry organisation jointly funded and run by advertisers, ad agencies, and broadcasting companies—and is the sole legitimate source of viewer ratings, i.e. TRPs or Total Rating Points. There are eight members on its board—of which four are heads of broadcasting companies, who basically call the shots. 

TRPs: Viewership numbers give us a channel/show’s TRPs or Total Rating Points. Ratings can be for one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes or over 24 hours. The numbers matter because they determine which channels/shows receive advertiser revenue—based on a calculation of cost-per-rating-point (CPRP). Higher the rating, higher the return on investment. The money at stake: TV industry, which was worth Rs 787 billion last year.

The TRP fraud

There’s a two-step method of calculating these numbers. And each is vulnerable to fraud.

One: BARC collects data via 44,000 ‘Bar-o-meters’ installed in households across India. 

• The meters detect ‘audio watermarks’ that are embedded in the video content—which is how they track what a person is watching. 
• When the TRP scam first broke in October, it involved bribing households to keep the TV tuned to a certain channel for hours on end. 
• At the time, the Mumbai police pointed their finger at Republic TV, Marathi channels Fakt Marathi and Box Cinema. 
• It later added Maha Movie and Wow music channels to the chargesheet (we explained this case here).
• Other forms of fraud include bribing cable operators to make a particular channel the ‘landing page’ of subscribers—i.e. the channel opens by default each time you turn on the TV.
• Also: Airing the same content on multiple channels—which is referred to as dual Local Channel Number (LCN).

Two: In 2019, BARC introduced algorithms that would correct the data for certain kinds of fraud—such as the ‘landing page’ variety. These are at the heart of the case against ex BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta—who was arrested on December 24. Others arrested: BARC COO Romil Ramgarhia, and Republic TV CEO Vikas Khanchandani.

According to the Mumbai police, Dasgupta colluded with Republic TV to tweak the algorithm. Specifically, he changed the ‘outlier rule’ which says if one household is stuck on a single channel for 12 hours, it should be ignored.  Also this:

“...Dasgupta had the knowledge of trades of viewership, trades of news viewership, trades of channel performance etc, which he used to manipulate ratings of Republic TV and Republic Bharat. He knew about the panel homes, which he used to share with the channels to use dual LCN, which further increased the ratings.”

Point to note: Much of the police evidence relies on an internal BARC audit report that was conducted once Dasgupta stepped down. The investigation focused on 44 weeks of data collection, starting in mid-2017—which is when Republic TV was launched, and astonishingly swept the ratings in its opening month.

The great WhatsApp leak

In its latest filing, the Mumbai police submitted 1000-plus pages of Dasgupta’s WhatsApp conversations—presumably accessed from his cloud backup. Not surprisingly, almost all the attention has focused on his chit-chat with Arnab. Here’s what we learned from this DM dump:

One: Goswami is privy to confidential information on matters of national security. Here’s his convo with Dasgupta on the eve of the Balakot strikes:

AG: “On another note something big will happen.”

PDG: “Dawood?”

AG: “No sir Pakistan. Something major will be done this time.”

PDG: “Good. It’s good for the big man in this season. He will sweep the polls.”

AG: “Bigger than a normal strike. And also on the same time something major on Kashmir. On Pakistan the government is confident of striking in a way that people will be elated. Exact words used.”

Two: Dasgupta and Goswami appear to be united by a common goal: boosting Republic’s TRPs. To sum up:

“Amid a wide spectrum of intrigue, their conversations throw light on what appears to be collusion between Republic TV and BARC to enable Goswami’s channel to access confidential TV viewership data and malign its competitors. It reveals BARC’s lobbying efforts with top ministers in the Narendra Modi government and the possible suppression of complaints against the pro-government channel in the ministry of information and broadcasting.”

Three: The Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore in 2017 helped bury complaints against Republic TV—specifically its illegal use of the free satellite TV network funded by the government to reach its 22 million subscribers. Typically, broadcast channels have to pay a fee that runs into crores to get a slot. Republic TV did not.

Four: Other than that, both of them talked smack about industry rivals and BJP ministers. They dissed Arun Jaitley as a “total failure,” dubbed current I&B minister Prakash Javadekar as “useless” etc. 

Point of irony: There are likely to be more serious consequences for that kind of loose talk than the leaks about Balakot.

Coming up next: Dasgupta has been rushed to the hospital, and is apparently in critical condition. BARC—which stopped publishing weekly ratings for news channels on October 15—may extend its policy for another three months. 

The bottomline: For all the hand-wringing and schadenfreude over Arnab and Republic TV, this case is just one of the many fronts in the ongoing war between the Shiv Sena and the BJP. No one knows its endgame except for the combatants. But we’re fairly sure that most trustworthy BARC data isn’t one of them.

Reading List

NewsLaundry has the best reporting on the WhatsApp chats and the BARC’s TRP issues. The Telegraph zeroes in on the Balakot angle. You could download the chats over here and read them for yourselves (though we’re not quite sure about this site). Quint has more on TRP scams in the past. Also read: Our explainer on the Mumbai police case that kicked off this investigation.