The city crime branch investigating the alleged Television Rating Points (TRP) rigging case has arrested former CEO Of Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) on Thursday.
Partho Dasgupta, former Chief Executive Officer (CEO), is the 15th person to be arrested in the case. Last week, BARC's former COO Romil Ramgarhia was arrested over his alleged involvement in the TRP rigging. Crime branch had alleged that Ramgarhia received huge profits for TRP manipulations.
According to the police, Dasgupta has been arrested from Pune Ruler which is under the jurisdiction of Raigad police station. He is currently being taken to Mumbai and will be produced before the court on Friday. Crime branch is yet to disclose Dashupta's role in the case, the Joint Commissioner of Police (crime branch) is likely to take a press conference on Friday for the same, said a crime branch officer.
In the second week of October, the Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh addressed a press conference and alleged several channels including Republic TV, along with Fakt Marathi, Box Cinema and few others channels indulged in alleged manipulations.
During over two months of investigation the crime branch has so far arrested Republic Media network's CEO Vikas Khanchandani and it's distribution head, Ghanshyam Singh along with couple of TV channel owners and several former Relationship Managers (RM) of Hansa Group a market research company hired by BARC to measure TRP.
According to the police, RMs were paid to manipulate the sampling metering services by inducing bar-o-meter households to watch particular TV channels and pay them periodically. Households were paid Rs 400-500 monthly, to watch a particular channel. There are 2,000 bar-o-meters installed in Mumbai to monitor TRPs.
