NEW DELHI: Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari has assured Parliament that the time of Urdu news from the Hyderabad Kendra of Doordarshan would be increased as the need arises.

He said that 44 Regional News Units of News Services Division, All India Radio, broadcast regional news bulletins.

In addition to this, a Regional News Unit has been set up at Kargil in Jammu and Kashmir which broadcasts regional news bulletins.

In Doordarshan, 29 Regional News Units telecast regional news from its various Kendras.

He said in reply to another supplementary question that both AIR and Doordarshan regularly transmit programmes which help the farmer in learning about various cultivation techniques and keeping him updated about the latest in this particular field.

There are 48 regional news bulletins in 18 languages, which are produced centrally from the News Service Division of AIR. In addition to this, 181 bulletins in 74 languages are produced and broadcast from the RNUs, and this covers the 22 scheduled languages.

There are 1019 news-based programmes from RNUs in 21 languages which are broadcast. And this totally amounts to 117 hours and 15 minutes of programming per week. In addition to that, you have 290 headline bulletins from FM Rainbow in 15 languages.

He accepted a suggestion to make the news as local as possible and content rich and more focussed on local imperatives.
 
Tewari said in reply to another supplementary that Prasar Bharati had been taking steps to augment infrastructure both in terms of gathering of news and dissemination of news in Doordarshan and AIR. A process has been started of digitising the various studios of Doordarshan to ensure that the quality of news which is broadcast is of the optimum level and this project will be completed by 2017. A total of 145 stations are currently being digitised.

In AIR, there are complaints which have come in that the medium wave transmission is not audible, and that, to a certain extent, is correct because over the years, the power of the transmitters have gone low because these are legacy equipment.

A total of 71 transmitters have been replaced in the 11th Plan and the power of 33 medium wave FM transmitters is being upgraded to see that broadcasting becomes better.

Prasar Bharati is also in the process of recruiting additional people and 1150 vacancies have been sanctioned.