Broadcast Audience Research Council appoints Nakul Chopra as CEO

Broadcast Audience Research Council on Friday announced the appointment of Nakul Chopra as its chief executive. Chopra will replace Sunil Lulla, who is leaving the TV audience body to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions, the council said in a statement.

He has served as the chairman of BARC in FY19, after being appointed to the board in 2016, the statement said.

"I am very happy to welcome Nakul as the natural and unanimous choice of the Board for the continuing journey of adding robustness to the BARC currency and strengthening the governance of the world's largest television audience measurement body," BARC's current chairman Punit Goenka said.


"TV continues to be the definitive screen of the Indian home - its strong reach and connects continue to elicit the trust of advertisers," Chopra said.

The resignation of Lulla, who had joined the body in October 2019, succeeding Partho Dasgupta, had come to light on Thursday.

During Lulla's term as the chief executive, Mumbai police started a probe into allegations of television rating points (TRP) manipulation, which led to the arrest of Dasgupta and a slew of other officials from the council or Hansa, the agency appointed by it as a vendor.

The police alleged that households under monitoring were paid to keep their TV sets on, which led to an artificial increase in a particular channel's viewership number. Dasgupta's alleged chats with Republic Channel's Arnab Goswami led to a controversy.

BARC responded to it by suspending the weekly ratings on news channels and assured everybody about taking a slew of steps to be as accurate as possible on its core work.