(5 April 2006 4:00 pm)

MUMBAI: The reach of Cable & Satellite (C&S) has grown marginally in the last three years while mass media seems to have stagnated, according to a recent IRS survey.

In urban India, C&S has gone up from 53.5 per cent in 2004 to 54.4 per cent in 2006. Television, in contrast, has declined from 80.2 per cent to 78.9 per cent during this period. Press has also slipped from a reach of 42.9 per cent to 41.7 per cent in the three-year period, the IRS 2006 Round I survey said.

The reach of TV in rural India, however, has grown by one per cent while Press has remained in the same position.

Radio is the only medium where the incidence of listenership is almost same both in urban (21 per cent) and rural (20 per cent) India.

Demographic Profile

The households have reached 210 million, growing by 1.4 per cent over 2005. Individual growth rate has been slightly lower than household growth rate at 0.85, taking the total 12 Yrs + population to 784 million.

The table below shows the share of different age group in the population.

For the IRS 2006 R1 survey, a total of 1178 towns and 2894 villages were surveyed. An annual sample size of 2,40,000 was covered, spread equally over two rounds. The fieldwork was conducted during the calendar year 2005 and the mid-point of the survey was 1 June 2005, IRS said in a release.