Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) Chairman Absar Alam says that a historical baggage being carried by the authority and technical/legal challenges have created the impression that the authority has lost its effectiveness.

In a compliance report submitted to the Supreme Court in the media commission case on June 15, Alam said the aforementioned challenges and a lack of resources caused operational difficulties for the PEMRA.

Interestingly, Alam himself is the petitioner in the media commission case. Alam said in the report that PEMRA needed manpower and huge financial resources to improve technical capability of its monitoring wing to enable it to effectively monitor 107 television channels. He said that PEMRA’s existing monitoring set-up could only monitor 50 television channels.

He said that PEMRA monitoring set-up had just 29 officials, but it needed at least 182 officials to monitor 50 television channels. He said that PEMRA needed 380 officials, including six IT experts and six dish antenna experts, for its monitoring wing to monitor 107 television channels.

The PEMRA chairman submitted to the court that the regulatory authority was in the process of awarding DTH licences. With the addition of about 250 more channels, he said, PEMRA’s monitoring wing would need about 750 skilled/professional people to monitor the electronic media on a 24/7 basis.

Alam said that PEMRA was mindful of its accountability role. He said the PEMRA policy should ideally address both – those who controlled communication resources and how it was justified or accounted for by those in control. He said that PEMRA was striving to close the gap between the legislative mandate and public expectations on the one hand and the actual and the perceived role attributed to it on the other.

The report stated that PEMRA sought to pursue the cases pending in various courts in a more robust manner. It said the regulatory authority was considering various proposals to rationalise the legal fees to protect its interests.

It said that performance of any regulatory body was measured on the basis of three basic ingredients i.e. licensing regime, revenue collection and enforcement/operation. As such, the report said, the PEMRA was substantially successful in the first two, although there was ample room for improvement. In the third aspect, it said, the PEMRA was lagging behind.