Republic TV CEO Granted Bail On Surety Of Rs 50,000

Republic TV Chief Executive Editor Vikas Khanchandani was on Wednesday granted bail by a Mumbai court on the surety of Rs 50,000 in the alleged TRP manipulation case . He was earlier remanded to police custody till December 15.

Prior to his arrest, Khanchandani was interrogated twice by the investigations in the alleged scam.

Khanchandani' role in the scam was identified during the interrogation of the channel's distribution head, Ghanshyam Singh, who was also arrested earlier. The investigators alleged that Khanchandani was part of an internal WhatsApp group in which discussions on Logical Channel Number (LCN) would take place. LCN is an identification number assigned to a TV channel, and the allegations against Republic TV are that it allegedly used dual LCN, which allowed it to show up in the genre of 'kids channels', apart from the 'news channels' category, thus showing up at two places. Investigators have claimed that Khanchandani knew about these alleged LCN manipulations.

Earlier in October, a case of manipulating television rating points against Republic TV was registered by Mumbai police after rating agency Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) filed a complaint through Hansa Reasearch Agency about rigging of TRP by some channels. It was alleged that viewers were bribed by an official of Hansa to view certain channels and increase their TRP.