On May 12, Times Now’s “super prime time” began early with even more panelists than usual. Called the Mega Poll, Times Now was announcing its exit polls conducted by research consultancy, ORG over six hours.

Things went fairly well if you discount the fact that a lot of the panelists didn’t think much of the numbers projected by ORG. However, the next morning (today), Arnab Goswami’s contemporaries – Rahul Kanwal (Editor-At-Large, HeadlinesToday and Aaj Tak) and Rajdeep Sardesai (Editor-In-Chief, IBN 18 network) decided to drop a bombshell on Twitter.

No guesses on which TV channel they were speaking of. So was this a baseless accusation? Or was there some truth to the fact that Arnab who claimed on his programme that “no one can question our credibility” had actually used a research firm that wasn’t credible?

By the time we’d thought of these two questions, Twitter had gone berserk with conjecture and accusations.

Was the poll actually “bogus”? We got in touch with the Managing Editor of ORG, Amit Roy. “The controversy’s arisen because there are multiple organisations with the name ORG. Our organisation is called the Operation Research Guild India Private Limited. We are a Kolkata-based organisation. We had initially registered ourselves in 2012 at Vadodara. Our agreement was only with a Hindi news channel called News Nation and because of an arrangement between Times Now and News Nation, they used our projections.”

So a mountain had been made of a molehill which a lot of Twitter moles had contributed to building? Going by what Roy said, the controversy is apparently the result of the fact that there is another organisation with the same abbreviation as ORG. This one is called Operation Research Group. Operation Research Group, according to Roy, works primarily in the field of engineering consultancy. Operation Research Group is based out of Delhi.

“Originally, the Operation Research Group used to be a part of the Sarabhai group till 1994 when it was sold to Business India. There was a collaboration with another organisation called MARG after which it was renamed ORG-MARG Research Limited. Finally AC Nielsen took over and it came to be known as AC Nielsen-ORG-MARG.

“I used to be a part of AC Nielsen-ORG-MARG. However, ORG soon became independent and I helped in setting up the new office in Delhi. I even put my own money into it”.

Roy, however, soon started a new company – the one which conducted the poll which was used by Times Now. When we enquired if Roy’s organisation, Operation Research Guild India Private Limited, had conducted any exit/opinion poll prior to this one with “the biggest sample set ever”, Roy said that the company had only conducted a few opinion polls before. “This is the first time we have conducted a poll for a media house. All our polls before were for political parties”.

Aah, a simple case of mistaken identity.

Or is it? It seems that Times Now didn’t do anything wrong – but a total disclaimer in this tale of namesakes would have definitely been welcome.

This is what Times Now retweeted.

But it’s not as simple as it seems.  We spoke to the Managing director of Operations Research Group Pvt. Ltd or (ORG) Debasish Banerjee, who said, “We have been doing electoral studies and polls for a long time – we’ve been in existence since 1961. Our firm is well known as ORG. In fact, we have registered a trademark over the acronym ORG with the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, Government of India”.

So it’s not as cut and dry as Roy would have us believe. A case of trademark infringement? Sounds a lot like it. A story for Arnab to follow? After all, the nation wants to know.