BWW will come out with an initial public offering of Rs 100 crore within the next few months to fund its plan, which will need an estimated investment of Rs 120-140 crore over the next three years, according to a senior official of the company.

There are four TARA regional channels already, one each in Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi.

"We will launch a movie channel in Bengali, called TARA Talkies, in November, and TARA Kolkata, a city-based Bengali cable channel in 50:50 joint venture with RP Goenka's RPG Netcom," the official said.

According to him, TARA Kolkata will focus on city-based news, events and entertainment programmes as it will be confined only in the RPG Netcom range and radius.

"The popular perception that only a national channel in Hindi could be a revenue grosser is wrong, since a majority of the country's population are keen on local language programming. Our strategy is just the opposite of that of Zee TV, which created brand equity first by launching a pan Asian channel, then diversifying into the Alpha brand of regional programming. We want to begin the other way," the official added.

Meanwhile, industry sources familiar with the developments in BWW say that the company is in deep financial trouble. "They are not even in a position to pay the committed amounts to the outsources," they say. And add: "one should not be surprised if the channel gets closed without any prior notice. One would not believe that the cheques issued by TARA are bouncing. Even the agreements with other agencies are going to be withdrawn soon."

TARA officials deny all these. "Agreements with different agencies are still there, although it is needless to continue them as the news programme is now closed due to some technical problems. Our set-up of uplinking facility is being upgraded and it will be back soon.

Secondly, we always issue cheques according to the cash position in the bank," a TARA official said.

He wittily remarked that so long there was no scam or scandal against a person or an institution, popularity does not come. "I think, a section of the industry, specially led by the highly placed officials of Bengali satellite channels, are spreading rumours against TARA. We do strongly believe that TARA's image, name and fame will remain intact," the official said.

It is learnt that STAR is also planning to bag the distribution rights of TARA channels.