NEW DELHI: The Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006 seeks to give the Government the power to prescribe restrictions to prevent cross-media monopoly, an emerging situation in India as leading media houses consolidate their hold over different segments of the media.

Drawing from the 1995 Supreme Court judgment on airwaves, which said that diversity of opinion was "essential to enable the citizen to arrive at informed judgment" and could not be provided by a medium controlled by a monopoly, be it of the State or any individual group/organisation, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has proposed cross-media ownership restrictions to ensure plurality of views.

Moving in slowly, the Bill empowers the Government to prescribe eligibility conditions and restrictions on accumulation of interest from time to time as the situation warrants.

While some of the restrictions under consideration pertain to equity, others seek to put a ceiling on the reach/subscriber base of channels. No content provider and its associated companies can have more than 20 per cent share of paid up equity or any other form of agreement with another such entity that would allow it to have managerial or editorial control over the latter. A similar provision is planned for broadcasting network service providers.

Also, no content provider for broadcasting will be allowed to have more than the prescribed share of the total number of channels in a city or a State. However, this condition will be subject to the overall ceiling of 15 per cent of the whole country. The same applies to broadcasting network service providers. Only in their case the criteria will be subscriber-base.

FM broadcasting

As of now, there is no cross-media ownership restriction in the country, resulting in the prevailing situation where several media houses — both English and vernacular — have stakes in print, radio and television. Waking up to the emerging monopoly situation in the radio segment, the Ministry in its revised policy for the second stage of FM broadcasting has mandated that no company can have more than 15 per cent of the total number of frequencies allotted.

An issue of debate

If the proposed cross-media ownership restrictions secure Parliament's approval, India will join leading democracies that already have similar provisions. Among the countries with such restrictions are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Greece. Still, this continues to be an issue of great debate and the Federal Communications Commission of the U.S. last week announced that it would review media ownership rules to address the issue of media consolidation and the impact it has had on diversity of news coverage.

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