All India Radio (AIR) has taken up a special project under which it is recording ceremonial songs that are sung across the country to preserve these for posterity.
This was stated in a written reply in the lok Sabha, Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore. He also informed that a manpower audit of Prasar Bharati will be conducted soon and that the Ministry has approached the Department of Expenditure under the Finance Ministry for it.
Rathore informed said that till date, 7,407 songs have been received in the AIR Directorate along with videography, photographs, musical notations, scripts, etc. Of these, 1,741 recordings have been sent to AIR archives for preservation, he said.
“These songs will be broadcast across the network in the regular time band for rural broadcast and also be preserved in AIR’s archives, which may monetise it like other archival assets,” he said.
On the manpower audit, Rathore said this has been done on the request of Prasar Bharati itself. He informed the Sam Pitroda Committee had given its report on Prasar Bharati on January 24, 2014.
According to this, Prasar Bharati, should have administrative and financial autonomy and called for complete transfer of ownership and management of assets and human resource to the broadcaster to make the organisation administratively and financially autonomous of Government.
He said that the ministry has asked Prasar Bharati to prepare an action plan for undertaking reviews, studies and audits on various issues for preparing a vision and strategy for the public broadcaster.
In a response to another question, Rajyavardhan Rathore provided details of the revenue earned by Prasar Bharati during 2015-16, as per which All India Radio and Doordarshan had jointly earned Rs 804.48 crore up to December 2015.