The Hindu : Implementation panel on CAS to be set up

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003

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Implementation panel on CAS to be set up

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI JULY 29. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry today decided to set up an implementation committee of broadcasters, multi-system operators and cable operators to oversee the rollout of the Conditional Access System (CAS). It has also sent a letter to broadcasters asking them for final prices of their pay channels.

The 19-member implementation committee may meet in a week possibly in Mumbai, as there is a view within the Ministry that much of the action on CAS has been Delhi-centric. The committee will be headed by the Additional Secretary in the I&B Ministry, Vijay Singh, and will have among its members Peter Mukherjea of Star TV, Subhash Chandra of Zee TV, G. Krishnan of TV Today, C. D. Rao of Sun TV, and representatives of the State Governments concerned.

With a little over a month left for the zone-wise rollout of CAS in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata besides all of Chennai, the committee will meet at least once a week to evaluate the preparedness of the notified zones at a technical level. It will also look at the availability of Set-Top Boxes (STBs) needed to access pay channels in the post-CAS regime.

Despite seeking information on final prices of pay channels and details of bouquet rates from broadcasters, the Ministry appears to have abandoned — at least for now — its efforts to persuade channel owners to lower their rates, and is now banking on them falling in line once CAS becomes an inevitability.

Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry today informed the I&B Ministry that the revised customs duty regime on the import of STBs would be extended to September 30. In response to I&B's demand for a reduction of import duty to control the price-line, the Finance Ministry had on May 29 decided to slash it by 45 per cent with the proviso that the revised duty regime would be effective only till July 31.

However, with CAS being deferred to September 1, the I&B Ministry recently approached the Finance Ministry once again with a request for extending the revised duty regime to facilitate the import of STBs in its initial phase.

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