India 2018

420 India 2018
for periods ranging from 1 to 4 years and finally has been under the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. At the time of partition, India
had six radio stations (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Tiruchirapalli and
Lucknow) and three radio stations went to Pakistan (Lahore, Peshawar and
Dacca, now in Bangladesh).
A 1,000 kw super power medium wave transmitter each was
commissioned at Mogra near Kolkata in 1969 and at Rajkot in 1971. Four 500
kw super power short wave transmitters were inaugurated at Bangalore in
1994. This made it one of the biggest transmitting centres in the world. The
first ever FM service was started in Madras on July 23, 1977. All AIR stations
were provided with 5 channel receiver terminals in 1985. Multitrack recording
studio was commissioned at Mumbai in 1994 and in Chennai in 1995.
Infrastructure
All India Radio came to be known as Akashvani from 1957. AIR took over
radio stations being run by native states since British days such as Akashvani
Mysore, Hyderabad Radio, and Radio Kashmir, etc.
From a meagre 18 transmitters in 1947 AIR acquired 46 by the end of
First Plan, 59 by the end of Second Plan, 110 by the end of Third Plan and
433 by the end of 11th Plan and hence forth by March-2017 total number of
transmitters went up to 612, consisting of 143 mw, 48 SW and 421 FM
transmitters. The number of radio stations went up from six in 1947 to 420
by March, 2017.
Software
AIR has evolved, over the years, a three-tier system of broadcasting namely
national, regional, and local. It caters to the information, education, and
entertainment needs of the audience through its stations in this country of
continental dimension with plural society. They provide news, music, spoken
words, and other programmes in 23 languages and 176 dialects to almost the
entire population of the country which crossed 1 billion mark recently.
The entertainment channel of AIR named Vividh Bharati was started
on October 3, 1957 and since November 1, 1967, commercials were aired on
this channel. The first Radio Sangeet Sammelan was organised in 1954,
which has since become annual feature. Akashvani Annual Awards to
promote excellence in Programme, Engineering, News and Audience Research
were instituted in 1974. Doordarshan was separated from AIR on April 1,
1976. The first broadcast by political parties before Elections went on the air
in 1977 from different stations of AIR. The North Eastern Service was
commissioned on January 3, 1990 at Shillong in the campus of AIR, Shillong.
The public service broadcasting initially in the evening transmission for
about five and a half hour daily has since been extended to three
transmissions. The programmes are beamed through a 50 kw SW transmitter
in Hindi and English besides music programmes in different languages/
dialects of all the states of the North East. Phone-in-Programmes were
introduced.