Sreya Kanugula
On January 20th, 2021, a Mumbai sessions court rejected the application filed for bail of Mr. Partho Dasgupta, the previous CEO of BARC, a rating agency in a case of scam on Television Ratings Point (TRP).
Mr. Dasgupta had been arrested in a Pune district by the crime branch of Mumbai in December 2020.
His bail plea had been rejected once before by a magistrate court after the court made the observation of the vital role he had played in the case of scam.
In opposition to the accused’s bail application, Mr. Shishir Hiray, a special public prosecutor made the submission that there are several case-related things that are yet to be investigated despite the completed filing of the chargesheet in this case.
He made the argument that the accused was one of the key persons and held significant control upon the entire system, therefore releasing him would easily mount to witness tampering. He added that these witnesses who will be called by the prosecution, work under Mr. Dasgupta.
Mr. Hiray also drew the attention of the court to the subject of the alleged Whatsapp chat that had taken place between Mr. Dasgupta and Republic TV reporter, Mr. Arnab Goswami.
“We have shown to the court the WhatsApp chat regarding the TRPs in which Dasgupta promised to take down some other channels and put Arnab’s channel on the higher position,” the prosecutor said.
The advocate of the accused informed the court that the allegations made on his client are baseless since they weren’t supported by any evidence.
Despite this, judge M A Bhosale found merit in the submissions made by the prosecution and rejected the bail plea of the accused.
Police had made allegations that Mr. Dasgupta colluded with one of the Broadcast Audience Research Council’s senior officials and the owner of ARG Outlier Media Pvt Ltd, Mr. Arnab Goswami to manipulate Republic TV’s TRPs as well as Republic Bharat, a Hindi channel’s TRPs.
They had made further claims that Mr. Goswami had given lakhs of rupees as payment to Mr. Dasgupta in exchange for this manipulation.
Republic TV along with the rest of the accused had promptly denied these allegations and any tampering with the TRP system.
This alleged scam was figured out in 2020 when a complaint was filed by BARC through the Hansa Research Group on claims that some TV channels were playing with the numbers of the TRP system.