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New Delhi, March 26: With elections round the corner, the information and broadcasting ministry has been flooded with applications for permission to start news channels.

In the past two months, the ministry has received 103 applications for permission to launch TV channels. More than half of these are for news channels.

“We have seen a sudden increase in the number of applications to start TV channels in the last one month. The new trend is that most of the applications are for starting news channels and they all want clearance before election time,” a ministry official said.

However, the ministry has decided to “go slow” on giving sanction and is considering ways to check the spurt in the number of channels, the official added.

“We are seriously thinking of imposing a cess to curb the reckless mushrooming of television channels,” the official said.

The highest number of applications have come from Andhra Pradesh, followed by Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka — states where every almost every party owns a channel, directly or indirectly.

Sources in the ministry said many of the applicants for new channels had the support of political parties.

“After the Trai recommendations, politicians are wary of appearing as the key promoters. They nominate someone else to run the channel,” the official said. Trai, the telecom regulator, had recommended last year that parties should not be allowed to run TV channels.

The amount of money parties spend on advertisements ahead of elections is also a strong incentive to launch news channels.

“When even the religious channels are carrying political advertisements, it is always a good business venture to have a news channel,” the official said.

A recent study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) had predicted TV ad revenue would grow at 13.5 per cent over the next five years.

At present, the country has 215 news and current affairs channels and 233 non-news channels.

The ministry had recently given permission to nearly 400 channels.