BARC employee allegedly involved in Rs 100 cr TRP manipulation scam

A Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India employee, Premnath, has allegedly received crores of rupees through cryptocurrency to manipulate television ratings in favour of a Kerala-based news channel, according to a twentyfour News investigation.

The funds were reportedly routed via USDT to a Trust Wallet account held by the employee and distributed across multiple digital wallets. Kerala Police have begun a preliminary inquiry after a complaint reached Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and BARC’s top management.

The media report noted that he supplied sensitive data, including PIN-code-level details of BARC meter locations, to the channel’s owner. Premnath most recently held the post of Vice-President at BARC India.

Nearly Rs 100 crore may have been transferred over time to secure early access to confidential BARC data and influence weekly ratings in favour of the channel. The Kerala Television Federation (KTF) lodged a detailed complaint seeking intervention, prompting State Police Chief Ravada Chandrashekhar to direct officers to examine digital and financial evidence.

The report cites WhatsApp chats, call records and screenshots that allegedly show weekly rating numbers being shared before BARC’s official releases. Some messages include PIN-code information and exchanges acknowledging payments. In at least one instance, the pre-shared numbers matched BARC’s final data exactly, raising suspicion of insider leaks.

The investigation also questions the broadcaster’s public explanation for a sudden spike in ratings. The channel claimed it was due to placement on the landing page of a small cable operator in North Kerala. The media report noted that the operator has only about 20,000 subscribers in a state with an estimated 8.5 million cable TV homes and argued that such limited exposure was unlikely to produce the scale of growth reflected in the data.

Beyond television, the broadcaster is said to have invested in overseas ‘phone-farming’ operations, particularly in Malaysia and Thailand, to artificially inflate YouTube viewership.

Premnath joined BARC in June 2015 as a senior manager, two months after the agency began releasing data. Before that, he worked for a decade at the Times Group. Several former Times Group employees later joined BARC, including Partho Dasgupta and Arnab Goswami, both of whom were arrested in the 2020 Mumbai TRP case but later received clean chits from the Enforcement Directorate. Mumbai Police also withdrew its case against them last year.