Two documents came out of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry this week. One tells streaming platforms and digital news publishers how to handle maps, crime footage and AI-altered media. The other asks the film industry what it wants changed, and has “box-office data” on the list.
The advisory
Dated 2 November, numbered DM/40/2026-DM, signed by deputy secretary Arpitha S with the competent authority’s approval, and addressed to OTT platforms, digital news publishers and intermediaries. Indian Television has the detail.
It asks recipients to follow the IT Act, 2000 and its rules “in letter and spirit”, and for intermediaries it points at Section 79 due diligence and Part II of the IT Rules, 2021, specifically the synthetic-content provisions in Rules 3(3) and 4(1A).
The nine points: time-stamp visuals and attribute the source; prefer authorised briefings to live coverage of anti-terror operations; blur violent visuals; report crime on verified facts only, with no misleading thumbnails or headlines; time-stamp calamity and accident footage; use only Survey of India maps; give context for communally sensitive quotations and visuals; comply with the non-disclosure rules for victims of sexual offences, citing Nipun Saxena v Union of India; and verify plus disclose AI-generated or altered media involving real people or events.
One point carries mandatory wording. The victim non-disclosure requirement says platforms “shall comply”. The other eight are advisory.
If that list feels familiar, it is because a near-identical set of points went to private satellite television channels in late October. The same template has now been rolled from broadcast onto streaming and digital news, without a new rule, a consultation or a notification. That is how media regulation actually expands in this country: not by statute but by advisory, arriving first where nobody objects and then everywhere.
We should be straight about sourcing. We have one outlet on this, and it is paraphrasing rather than reproducing the advisory. It carries the number, date and signatory, which is the kind of detail that comes from the document itself, so we are reasonably confident of its existence and contents. But nobody should quote the nine points as text until the ministry publishes the PDF.
The consultation, and the line that matters to us
Separately, on 3 November the ministry invited filmmakers, actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors, streaming platforms and others to send suggestions to a high-level study group on the film industry, chaired by Prasoon Joshi. Indian Television has that too, including a revised panel composition order of 29 October superseding one from 17 July.
The scope is broad: financing and funding models, exhibition infrastructure, distribution and market access, film festivals, incentives, international co-productions, overseas promotion, skill development, AI and virtual production, a policy framework with state governments.
And box-office data.
We have spent the last month establishing that almost every box office figure published in India traces back to one private tracker; that outlets quoting it at different hours get presented as independent corroboration; that the only genuinely separate tracker runs consistently lower, by up to thirty crore on a single film; and that not one producer certified a single number in October. That piece is here. The country’s biggest film of the year has a worldwide total that ranges across ten crore depending on which page you read.
So a government panel asking about box-office data is, for once, asking the right question. What it should produce is dull and achievable: a standard definition of net and gross, a mandatory tracker attribution, and a producer-reported weekend figure. Every other film market of this size has one. Ours has a sidebar.
Who is on the panel
Prasoon Joshi as chairperson, G Krishna Kumar of the NFDC, Ashutosh Gowariker, Ravi Kottarakara, Vivek Agnihotri, Bimal Parekh, Aparna Purohit, Ritesh Sidhwani and Kartik Aaryan, with the Joint Secretary for Films as member secretary.
Read that list against the year it is reporting on. The biggest Indian film of 2026 is Tamil. A Kannada film has done ₹130 crore on word of mouth. Malayalam cinema out-earns Hindi cinema per screen overseas. The panel contains, at most, one figure drawn from the southern industries, and no named representative of the Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam or Bengali industries or their chambers.
A panel on the future of Indian cinema that is this weighted towards Mumbai will produce recommendations about Mumbai’s problems. Exhibition infrastructure in Karnataka, state subsidy processes that are four years in arrears, and single-screen economics outside the metros are not going to be well represented by the people in that room, however good they are at their own jobs.
Two caveats. We have not seen the ministry’s own release, so the list should be checked against a PIB notification before anyone quotes it as final. And the 3 November invitation sets no deadline, either for suggestions or for the group’s report, which was originally meant to arrive within three months of its June announcement. That deadline has passed without a replacement.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Submit something. That is the practical point of this piece.
There is no deadline, the scope is wide enough to accommodate almost any serious proposal, and the people who will otherwise fill that consultation are the ones who already have the ministry’s phone number. If you run a single screen in a district town, if you produce in Kannada on a thirty-lakh budget, if you are one of the people whose welfare cess is being litigated in the Karnataka High Court while you keep paying it, this is the one open door.
And on the advisory, the thing to watch is not any of the nine points. It is the method. A template written for television has been applied to streaming and digital news in a fortnight, by letter, with no rule change. The eight advisory points are reasonable on their face. The precedent is that the next eight do not need to be.
Sources
- Indian Television: the nine-point advisory
- Indian Television: MIB seeks film industry feedback
- Outlook: the study group’s original announcement, June 2026
Both in-window documents reach us through a single outlet, which paraphrases rather than reproduces them. We have not seen the ministry’s own releases.
