•IRS 2013 was released on January 28, 2014.

•In the week since then, there has been considerable comment and discussion in the media about the quality of the study. Yesterday, the Indian Newspaper Society sought a meeting with the MRUC to discuss the situation and the way forward. Following on from this meeting, the MRUC Chairman convened an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors to crystallise the Council’s point of view. This meeting held earlier today has taken the following decisions:

•The Council asserts that the design, methodology and in-field execution of the study was benchmarked to and conducted at the very highest standards. The massive integration of technology, from DS-CAPI, through automated collation and tabulation, to a brand new UI (user interface) with a comprehensive suite of on-board analytics played a crucial role in this exercise. The Council intended to deliver a study that could legitimately carry the ‘Gold Standard’ appellation. It is satisfied that the study has moved many steps forward in that direction.

•The Council is conscious that it is now only one of the two constituents of the Readership Studies Council of India. With the RSCI now being in charge of governance of the study, the MRUC is no longer at liberty to make a unilateral determination of the way forward, particularly in a situation as contentious as it appears today.

•The Council looks forward keenly to the RSCI meeting called by the RSCI Chairman on February 19, 2014. All aspects of the study will be placed before the RSCI for helping the broader community of stakeholders convince themselves about the study’s robustness and integrity.

The statement issued by publishers is reproduced below:

“We, the leading newspapers of the country, condemn the newly published Indian Readership Survey (IRS 2013) in the strongest possible terms.

The survey is riddled with shocking anomalies, which defy logic and common sense. They also grossly contradict audited circulation figures (ABC), of long standing. While there are hundreds of such anomalies in the report, we are highlighting just a few of them here.

• There are wild swings in overall newspaper readership across states. While Punjab has lost a whopping one-third of all its readers in just a year since the last IRS, neighboring Haryana has grown by 17 per cent.
• Every major newspaper in Andhra Pradesh, irrespective of language, has de-grown by 30 to 65 per cent.
• There are similarly wild swings at the city level. Mumbai shows a 20.3 per cent growth in overall English readership, while Delhi (a faster-growing city overall on all macroindices) shows a drop of 19.5 per cent.
• Hitavada, the leading English newspaper of Nagpur with a certified circulation of over 60,000 doesn’t appear to have a single reader now!
• Hindu Business Line has thrice as many readers in Manipur as in Chennai!!”

Given these glaring anomalies, we urge our advertisers and media agencies not to rely upon use the recently published IRS results in any way.

We also strongly ask RSCI and MRUC, the conductors of the Indian Readership Survey, to withdraw the results of IRS 2013 immediately and  as well as put a stop to all future editions of this survey, as their continued publication will cause irreparable injury to the reputation of established publications like ours.”

Source: Campaign India