With the government bent on revamping the public broadcaster Prasar Bharati for the past one month a lot of plan has been proposed to upgrade and ensure the fulfillment of its role as the public broadcaster.

The first major step geared towards revamping the public broadcaster the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has constituted an Expert Committee to review the institutional framework of Prasar Bharati, including its relationship with the Government, its continuing role as a public broadcaster and measures needed to ensure technical upgradation of the organisation.

The Expert committee headed by Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure & Innovations has already set up a 11 working groups to review the public broadcaster and deal with crucial issues such as financial management, programming, technology, digitisation and manpower shortage.

As reported by exchange4media, Pitroda is known to have said that the expert committee will study the BBC model as well as the model where direct Parliament subsidy is involved. The entire issue assumes significance as the Government spends close to Rs 1,800 crore annually on Doordarshan, whereas Prasar Bharati was created to work as a public broadcaster and it is essential to make it financially independent and sustaining. The working group on Business Development will study and recommend how it could be done without compromising with its public service mandate and without being dictated by market forces.

It is important to see how successful would the committee be as it is the fourth time since such a committee has been set up since 1996.

Further , Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar has also said that the public broadcaster had taken a policy decision over the past one month to advertise its programmes on other TV or radio channels and the board had decided to allocate funds for this. The government had also promised a sum of Rs 6.2 billion for salaries and infrastructure. He said the money on infrastructure would be spent first on replacing outdated transmitters with new ones.

It is also known that Doordarshan is increasing the strength of its sales and marketing team in a bid to attract more advertising revenue. A full fledged promotion drive, not only across the DD network, but also private channels and especially digital media is on the cards.

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