ORG and AC Nielsen did the last NRS survey and the findings had whipped up a controversy with the newspaper industry with both the Times of India and The Hindustan Times claiming to be No 1 by interpreting the numbers in their own different ways.

Each NRS survey has an urban-rural sample size of over 200,000 respondents covering representative urban towns and rural villages.

The ABC has stated that research organisations with proven capabilities of undertaking such large-scale surveys may apply in writing giving details of infrastructure and relevant experience to National Readership Studies Council, based in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, according to NRS 2003, TV penetration growth had been flat, cinema negative, while radio and print posted growth.

At an all-India level, media reach according to NRS '03 has registered no significant change over NRS 2002. Instead, penetration of cinema slipped by three per cent, while that of cable and satellite (C&S) had remained constant at 20 per cent. Incidentally, in 2002, cable penetration had shown an increase by 31 per cent over the earlier year.

Readership figures of several publications had shown downward trends in the top level findings of phase one of NRS 2003.