August 30, 2013 was just another day at the Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT). The tribunal housed on the 3rd floor of Hotel Samrat on Kautilya Marg at Chanakyapuri in the national capital, went about business as usual, pronouncing 36 judgments pertaining to telecom disputes.  However, lost among the 36 was one judgment that could go a long way in determining the quality (or the lack of it in this case) of content India’s almost 200 million cable TV viewers receive.

The judgment in question, in a nutshell, restricts the Telecom Regulatory Association of India (TRAI) from taking coercive measures against the News Broadcasters’ Association and its members for flouting what is known in media parlance as the “10+2 rule”. Now, for people who’re not cool enough to be savvy with media jargon – the 10+2 rule refers to the cap on advertisement duration to 12 minutes. This 12 minutes was divided into 10 minutes of commercial advertisements and 2 minutes of the channel’s self-promotion – per hour of broadcast.

And if you thought the rule was set by the ever-cranky TRAI, it wasn’t. It’s a part of Rule 7(11) of the Cable Network Regulation Rules, 1994 framed by the government – which essentially means it is a law of sorts.  But then Indians care only so much for frivolities like rules and regulations.The broadcast media routinely and brazenly flouted this rule for years. Not that anyone cared as such. Until a tough administrator who believes that it’s not all that bad to refer to the rule-book at times, decided he had had enough. The all-knowing media, which often reminds the rest of us of rules and law, needed to be reminded as well.

That was in March last year when Rahul Khullar, an IAS officer of the 1975 batch took over as the chairman of TRAI. Much garbage has flown down the Yamuna since. In wake of the recent judgment by the TDSAT, all that’s happened in the last year and a half is that TRAI has consolidated its image of being the old whiney man who complains about everything that’s wrong with and about the world, but can never change anything.

In case you’re being led to believe that this is about TRAI’s incompetence to be what it is – a regulatory body – it is not. To be doing that, we’d have to ignore the entire design of how things work in this country.  And to understand precisely that, I’ll try recapping all that’s happened since March when the diminutive but fiery Mr Khullar thought he would do what is most difficult to do in this country – your job.

March 2012:  TRAI comes up with a detailed consultation paper on “Issues related to advertisements in TV Channels”.

May 2012: It notifies the Standards of Quality of Service (Duration of Advertisements in Television Channels) Regulations, 2012.

The notification meant that the 10+2 rule among other guidelines on the consultation paper was to be followed with immediate effect, which is when all hell broke loose. Broadcasters challenged the regulation.  TRAI predictably backed off. After all, no one messes with the media. TRAI promised to reconsider the ruling, which it did by coming up with a liberally amended version in March of this year, but the critical bit on the advertisement cap of 12 minutes remained intact – much to the indignation of the broadcasters.

It was then that the climax which concluded on August 30, 2013 – began (at least till another two months, when the TDSAT is scheduled to hear both sides again).

The broadcasters realised that Mr Khullar wasn’t just another 10-to-5 sarkaari babu, and for them to have things their way the jugaad needed to be right at the top this time. The broadcasting fraternity, led by the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) and the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), did exactly what you do in India when Rules come your way – lobby the government directly, and the man chosen was the Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Manish Tewari. Tewari expectedly spoke in the voice of a politician – diplomatic and exasperatingly vague, saying something about striking the right balance.

To understand the exact nature of the conflict it is important to understand what grievances both parties (TRAI and the broadcasters) have against each other. While TRAI’s stand is quite clear and is in line with what the rulebook of the country says, the broadcasters have accused TRAI of overstepping the line and going beyond its jurisdiction citing the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 19(1) (a) and (g) of the Constitution in its support. Also, the broadcasters have accused TRAI of trying to enforce the regulations at a non-conducive time when “news channels are facing a most unfriendly business environment, non-receipt of advertisements from the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) and the low level of digitisation in the country”.

Again, for the sake of people who’re not well-versed with either numbers or the Indian Constitution, the aforementioned articles ensure the right of the citizen to free speech and practice of any trade or profession. Whether TRAI’s regulation infringes on those rights, I’d leave it upon the reader to decide. And as far as the broadcasters’ accusation of TRAI overstepping its border of jurisdiction goes, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology vide Gazette Notification No. 39, dated January 9, 2004, notified the “Broadcasting Services and Cable Services to be Telecommunication Services”. Since duration of advertisements is very directly and absolutely unarguably related to the viewers experience and satisfaction it belies me as to how TRAI is acting beyond its purview. Again I’d leave it to the reader to take his/her call.  The third argument about it being a “bad time” to enforce a rule that’s existed for so long perhaps does merit some deliberation. Perhaps, I say, because the times indeed are not the brightest as far as the financial health of the media is concerned. However, the fact that that the designs of the country’s mechanisms allow so much room to not follow a rule that’s been in place for almost two decades is telling of a lot of things that we as a country shouldn’t exactly be proud of. Also, the broadcasters’ claim of needing more advertisements to pay salaries is somewhere a little misplaced as it is hardly a secret that most of the recent downsizing has been driven by corporate compulsions.

While on the face of it, the whole stand-off appears to be a simple case of a business entity wanting to make more profits by pushing the rules as much as they can and a regulating agency trying to enforce the rules as stringently as they can (a scenario utterly commonplace across the world), it’s the backdrop of the conflict that deserves a little scrutiny — the extrapolation of which could help us understand a much more convoluted reality. A very important part of the broadcast media is the news industry, and at a time when the General Elections are less than a year away, the government recognises the importance of not antagonising news channels whose reach in terms of shaping opinions of the voting population is much higher than the print media. Also, the government is equally aware of the veracity that getting a tribunal to do damage-control is much less messy than actually amending a rule – a process that brings along with it a lot of unwanted attention.

The DTSAT, on November 11, 2013, will appraise the situation once again and deliver its final judgment. Until then, we’ll just have to change channels when the advertisements start seeming longer than the news itself. Or perhaps, like everything else in the country, just adjust.