The good old golden voice of Akashvani has today gone mobile witnessing a revivalist trend with youngsters and professionals tuning into popular FM channels on their cellphones and car radios. The hoary days of All India Radio (AIR) when people used to wake up, listening to Ameen Sayani, Melville de Mello, Surjit Sen and Nagamani Rao, and go to sleep on the haunting melodies of Lata Mangeshkar, can never be forgotten. Thanks to this new trend, we have seen a 30 per cent rise in listenership (a FICCI media & entertainment report) as well as increase in revenues for both FM and AM channels, says R Venkateswarlu, ADG (Prasar Bharati) marketing, manning the entire southern region.

Realising its strengths and weaknesses, Akashvani which is more than 80 year old, is gearing up to make its programming more interesting and people centric and propagate literary and cultural issues with a new twist. “Even the production aspects have undergone a paradigm change and we are going in for serialised programming like television. This has already started with dramatisation of literary novels so as to garner elite listeners. The biographies of all Jnanapith awardees of the four southern states with focus on their literary works is in the pipeline while the best novels of Sahitya Academy winners will be put on air. Also, our staff has won the highest awards in the field of literature and folk arts and this is a great recognition for broadcasters,” elaborates Venkateswarlu.

AIR’s contribution to literary and cultural history of the country is yeomen as one of its producers, Ravuri Bharadwaj, is a Jnanpith awardee whose book on the life behind the film screen has won the country’s highest award.

Two of their producers, Krishnamurthy and B Rajanikant Rao, have also been felicitated with Sangeet Natak Academy awards while the in-house talent of classical musicians is something to be proud of.

Commercial component

With the government deciding to change its funding policy for Prasar Bharati and restrict it to just payment of salaries and digitisation of equipment, Akashvani will now have to generate its revenues for software

development and operational expenses from 2014. “Presently, less than 10 percent commercial revenue is generated only through Vividh Bharati and we are planning to increase it to 40 per cent by content modification. Our aim is to exploit and explore the public service content by teeming up with public sector units and certain government departments who have bulk budgets for publicity.

Apart from this, we are planning to put out financial literacy programmes to support various government schemes and in this regard, a few banks like Canara Bank have already responded positively. With digitisation of radio stations progressing, our programme executives will be multi-tasking by marketing their programmes too,” he adds.

Their long list for future programming also includes: Public grievances with phone-in and field recordings, spots on PSUs, NGOs and government departments, customised programming on major issues, serial form of production, invited audience programmes in different cities, stepped up archival content, holding live music and dance festivals, highlighting 10 major festivals like Deepavali, Ramzan, Christmas, Onam, Pongal, etc which will be taken up for brand booking in the four southern states.

Festival package

“There will be a combined effort by all the four states to market our festival package and build our brand. Apart from this, our strength and specialisation in development communications will come to our rescue by helping us understand the pulse of the people and what issues to be projected and this will definitely increase our revenues. Every feedback that we get on a development scheme is sent back to the government for corrective measures.

Private FM is there only in the cities and our presence in the rural hinterland is phenomenal. In fact, a variety of rice (IR-8) which was propagated by Akashvani Tiruchi is popularly called as Radio rice by farmers,” sign off Venkateswarlu with pride.

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