I&B admits: It does a daily chai pe charcha with ‘autonomous’ Doordarshan, AIR

Sources said the primary agenda of the daily meetings was to plan, design and implement strategies to promote the work done by the government.

Defending the meetings, Julka said, “The idea is to bring all government media units together and chart out plans for disseminating information about government programmes and promoting them. There is no interference in the functioning of DD or AIR.”

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The I&B Ministry has been mandated to improve the “working” of DD and AIR, he added. “The government has said it wants to make both DD and AIR the most watched channels in the country. Our intention in involving them in our daily charcha is limited to that.”

Apart from the DGs of DD and AIR, the heads of Press Information Bureau and Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity attend the meetings.
A senior official from one of the units who has been attending the meetings since they began claims, “we keep getting regular inputs from the prime minister’s office on communication strategies on various fronts”. According to him, the meetings were initiated after a directive “from the top”.

Recently, said sources, the government asked Doordarshan to produce promotional films for programmes such as on the birth anniversaries of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and Sardar Patel, on Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, as well as ad films for campaigns such as Swachh Bharat and Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Abhiyan, instead of hiring advertising agencies as they usually do.

A senior official involved in the exercise said, “DD has made several audio-visual films for promoting government programmes and policies. Not only have we been airing these films on our channels, these have been released to other (private) channels as well.”

Asked why the government had asked DD to produce the promotional films instead of hiring an advertising agency, Julka said: “We are proud of the talent we possess in-house (at DD and AIR). For long this talent has been ignored and it is only good that it is now being put to use.”