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Country’s first educational TV channel will air for 16 hours
The
country’s first dedicated educational television channel, which was
launched on Republic Day with a daily beam of eight hours, has doubled
its telecast time to 16 hours.
Gyan Darshan is a free-to-air channel which has been launched as a collaborative
venture of Prasar Bharati, the Human Resource development ministry and
the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) whose electronic media
production centre has been converted into a studio-cum-earth station (Sanchar
Kendra complex).
The channel is available on INSAT 2B in geostationary orbit at 93.5 degrees
east using transponder C-12 (vertical polarisation) and available on 4170
mhz. The programmes will be telecast from 0545 hrs to 2145 hrs, and includes
eight hours of original programming followed by repeats.
The complex is the outcome of an Indo-Japan friendship treaty project,
fully equipped for production and transmission of electronic media software,
apart from being a national resource centre.
The Human Resource Development ministry is to meet the cost of running
the channel and Doordarshan has lent its name and given a transponder
free of charge. The software for the channel comes from various sources
including the consortium for education communication and the university
grants commission, the National Council for Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) and its instructional educational television units, the Indian
institutes of technology, and the departments of space, science and technology.
The aim of the channel is to reach different segments of the population:
pre-school, school, non-formal system learners, teachers, university students,
technical and management students, adult learners and others. A tentative
programme schedule had also been worked out for the weekdays and the weekends.
Regular time-slots for popular employment-oriented informative programmes
offered by the government and private sector covering subjects such as
career guidance and counselling, consumer education and workers’
education will be in the sponsored category.
The Human Resource Development ministry source said more than 100 sources
of educational material had already been identified, and these included
foreign missions, educational institutions, research bodies, Doordarshan,
central ministries, non-governmental organisations, and affiliated bodies
of the United Nations. l
UNI