To expand reach, DD Kisan to be multilingual

In an effort to serve major part of our country’s farming community, national broadcaster Doordarshan is set to turn DD Kisan — a dedicated television channel for farmers — into a multilingual one. Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May last year as part of the completion of one year of the NDA government in office, the channel currently broadcasts programmes only in Hindi.

Sources stated that the step comes after demands from several regions of the country for programmes in local languages. It is understood that the public broadcaster is aiming to increase the viewership of the farming channel beyond the Hindi heartland.

Sources stated that the plans are being laid out for improving quality of DD Kisan’s content and attracting more viewers. It is learnt that a phase-wise introduction of language programmes is expected to be made soon.

The DD Kisan channel, dedicated to agriculture and allied sectors, disseminates real-time inputs to farmers on new farming techniques, water conservation and organic farming among other information.

With a majority of country’s population engaged in the agriculture sector the channel — after going multilingual —- is expected to be one of the key 24-hour channels in DD’s kitty.

The national broadcasters — Doordarshan and the All-India Radio — have been running programmes related to agriculture and farming for the past several decades.

As part of its programming for farmers, Doordarshan has been running Krishi Darshan for the past several decades. It is of the longest running programmes on the national channel which was launched on January 26, 1967. The channel is also expected to modernise and change its content for farmers. The Prasar Bharati is also likely to seek crowd-sourced ideas on the contours and content of the new and improved DD Kisan. The government will had launched a dedicated agri-television channel ‘DD Kisan’ last year to provide real-time information to farmers and earmarked Rs 100 crore in Budget 2014-15 for this purpose.