MUMBAI, May 19 : Television news viewership in Hindi speaking markets during Operation Sindoor of the Indian armed forces was higher than the news audience traffic recorded during days around the 2016 surgical strike, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) said on Monday.

  The Hindi TV news share in the over 15 HSM (Hindi speaking market) increased to 15 per cent during the week of Operation Sindoor from 4 per cent recorded before the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, the BARC said.

This is “above the share it garnered during the surgical strikes in 2016,” the body added.

Indian armed forces had on September 29, 2016 carried out cross-border surgical strikes on terrorists sites in Pakistan’s Balakot in retaliation to the deadly terror attack at an Army base in Uri.

Days after 26 civilians were killed in a terror attack in Pahalgam, the Indian armed forces under Operation Sindoor on May 7 this year hit at least nine terrorist launch pads in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The latest data showing an increase in TV viewership comes even as concerns have been raised about the quality of the reportage during Operation Sindoor stemming from the veracity of reports and also style of presentation.

The BARC statement said weekly television news viewership reached the highest level at least since 2022, when it restarted computing the numbers on a weekly basis and 507 million viewers watched the news in the week to May 9.

News genre peaked and accounted for 16 per cent of TV viewership during the three critical days of May 7-9 as against the usual 6 per cent, the body said.

The gross rating points (GRPs) during the Operation Sindoor climbed up to 254, breaching the 235 GRPs level achieved in the week 23 of last year during the Lok Sabha results and 211 GRPs in week 10 of 2022 during the multiple state elections verdict.

Hindi news also clocked the highest average time spent (ATS) of 60 minutes, an increase of 67 per cent over the pre-Pahalgam attack weeks, the report said.

Daily tune-ins on Hindi news on critical days of May 7-9 nearly doubled to 142 million from 73 million, it said.

There were spikes in viewership during the three official briefings on the operation by the Indian armed forces, the body said.

It said a total of 65 million viewers who had never sampled Hindi news channels in the prior month tuned into a Hindi news channel during the week, the statement said. (PTI)