There will be no cap in North-East and Jammu & Kashmir for owning FM stations by public and private sectors. Besides, in the next two to three months, FM transmission would run for 18 hours — from 6 am to 12 am. Stating this during question hour, MoS for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore told the lok Sabha that while news could be allowed in FM channels, a real time monitoring of news on these channels was an issue. He said while satellite allows nation-wide broadcast on AIR FM, the same was not possible in private channels where broadcast was limited to 50 km only.
The Minister was responding to queries from members over the fact while Twitter and Facebook were running freely without any control from the Government, news was not allowed on private FM channels. Currently, private FM channels are not allowed to broadcast news under the FM Radio (phase-II) policy guidelines.