Govt to go ahead with digitisation in Phase-III and IV markets

4.9 million households have further been removed from Phase-III, bringing down total addressable population from 38.8 million households to 33.2 million, with max impact in West Bengal, Kerala, Goa and Jharkhand

Even as the implementation of digital addressable system (DAS) has been stayed in several states, government today said it will stick to its plan of rolling out digitisation in Phase-III and IV markets.

"We are totally committed to digitisation. When we stopped to give the third extension after December 31, some of the cable associations have obtained stay orders from High Court. We have gone to the Supreme Court to plug all these litigations," Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Secretary Sunil Arora said at the 'FICCI Frames' event here.

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"We will absolutely stick by the timetable given to us. If someone has put a stay order, we cannot do anything about it," he added.

The ministry had extended the deadline to implement digitisation in the Phase-III markets to December 31, 2015, from December 2014.

At present, the implementation has been stayed for varying periods across the Phase-III markets of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Orissa, Sikkim and Telangana, apart from Tamil Nadu where digitally addressable system implementation has been challenged since its Phase-I rollout.

Phase-III is the largest addressable market with an original estimated analog subscriber base of nearly 39 million households.

As per the fifth updated list of urban areas to be covered under Phase-III, issued by the ministry, nearly 14.6 million households are expected to be impacted due to the stay order, accounting for nearly 44 per cent of the addressable households in these markets.

According to an Icra report, in view of the low household concentration in certain areas, the ministry remapped such areas from Phase-III to Phase-IV.

Consequently, nearly 4.9 million households have further been removed from Phase-III, bringing down the total addressable population from 38.8 million households to 33.2 million, with the maximum impact in West Bengal, Kerala, Goa and Jharkhand.

Arora added the ministry will be approaching the Cabinet with a new set of proposals for the next batch of the FM radio phase III auctions.

"We did the FM auction last year. We are trying to learn from those learnings in terms of lock-in period, reserve price and soon we should be going to the Cabinet with our set of new proposals based on those learnings for the next phase (batch) of FM radio auctions," he said.

A total of 839 frequencies are proposed to be auctioned in batches during phase III.

The first batch of phase III auctions began on July 27 and ended on September 16, with 135 frequencies, of which 97 frequencies were won on a provisional basis.