With over 14,222 posts lying vacant in the All India Radio and Doordarshan, a Parliamentary panel has asked the Information and Broadcasting Ministry how the public broadcaster can work effectively without filling up these posts. It has asked the Ministry to coordinate with the Staff Selection Commission to fill the vacancies without further delay.
The staff strength of AIR and Doordarshan is 48,022 as on January 1, 2012 and of 14,222 vacant posts 3,452 were more than one-year-old and so covered under deemed abolition, stated the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology in its report submitted in Parliament on Tuesday.
Since the Department of Expenditure has cleared 1,150 posts the ministry should take steps to fill them. It has also emphasised the need to immediately implement the Government decision to allow 3,000 new recruitments. Expressing concern over the Prasar Bharati’s inability to meet the financial requirement of the organisation and its dwindling revenue generation, the panel said that its demand to grant service tax exemption and directive to all ministries/PSUs to use public broadcaster for all their publicity campaigns must be seriously considered.
The Prasar Bharati has also demanded complete waiver of space segment and spectrum charges on actual basis every year and uninterrupted allocation of frequency authorisation/space segment to AIR/DD to ensure its operational autonomy. As far as digitisation process is concerned, against the requirement of 160 lakh Set Top Box since only 105 lakh have been installed. The committee asked the ministry that progress should be commensurate with availability of equipment and infrastructure rather than blindly following restricting the target to December 2014.