MUMBAI: After a long tenure of being strict in awarding channel licenses, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has finally become lenient. In the month of September, eight new channels received licenses while none saw their licenses cancelled as on 30 September 2018.

Out of the eight channels, four channels were of Zee Media Corporation Ltd (ZMCL). All the four permissions are for news channel named 1 Chennai (Tamil, English), 1 Mumbai (Marathi, English), 1 Kolkata (Bengali, English) and 1 Delhi (Hindi, English). The permission was given on 11 September 2018 for both uplinking and downlinking of the four channels.

On the other hand, Disney Broadcasting India got the permissions for a non-news channel UTV HD (English) for both uplinking and downlinking on 14 September 2018.

Vedic Broadcasting has got permission for launching three new channels named Aastha Tamil, Aastha Telugu and Aastha Kannada on 26 September 2018.

The 14 licenses which were cancelled earlier by MIB due to security denial by Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) are still now under stay order from the court.

After cancelling permission to 247 channels, the number of private satellite TV channels having valid permission in India stands at 869 as on 30 September 2018. 483 channels are non-news channels and the remaining 386 are news channels.

Of the 868 permitted private satellite channels, TV channels permitted for uplinking from India and also to downlink into India are 769 among which 365 are news channels and 404 are non-news channels. 11 non-news channels and five news channels are permitted for uplinking from India but not downlink into the country. 84 TV channels are uplinked from abroad which only have downlinking permission in India. This category includes 15 news and 69 non-news channels.