New Delhi, Oct 7 (IANS) With TV channels proliferating by the day, the government Friday took a set of decisions to weed out non-serious aspirants by hiking from Rs.3 crore to Rs.20 crore the net worth of those wishing to run current affairs channels.


A meeting of the Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, approved the proposal of the Information and Broadcasting ministry to recast the existing "Policy Guidelines for Uplinking and Downlinking of TV channels".

The amendments envisage significant changes in the eligibility criteria of companies seeking to operate TV channels in India.

These changes have been done in "order to ensure that only serious and credible operators are permitted to operate such channels and the electronic media landscape is not unnecessarily crowded by non-serious players," said a statement after the Cabinet meeting.

The ministry had proposed various amendments in the existing policy to reflect the fast evolving electronic media landscape in the country after intense consultation with Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Till August, the ministry has granted permission to 745 private satellite TV channels out of which 366 TV channels were permitted in the category of "News and Current Affairs and and 379 in the category of "Non-News and Current Affairs".

The cabinet revised the net worth criteria for uplinking of non-news and current affairs channels and downlinking of foreign channels from Rs.1.5 crore to Rs. 5 crore for the first channel and Rs 2.5 crores for each additional channel.

For uplinking of news and current affairs channels, the net worth/criteria has been increased from Rs. 3 crore to Rs. 20 crore for the first channel and Rs 5 crores for each additional channel.

Under the new guidelines, all TV channels would be required to operationalize their TV channels within a time frame of one year from the date of permission, for which non-news and current Affairs channels will have to sign a Performance Bank Guarantee (PBG) of Rs.1 crore.

News channels are required to give a Performance Bank Guarantee for Rs.2 crore. In the event of non-operationalisation of the permitted channel within a period of one year, the bank guarantee will be forfeited and permission cancelled.