Work is on to have a public broadcasting platform with a global
presence, Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar said today. Shekhar, who is here to participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017 jointly organised by the US and India, said it is extremely important for India to have its public broadcasting with a global footprint. "Thats an urgent priority as well," he said when asked why India does not have a BBC or Al Jazeera kind of platform to reach out to global audience. In fact, he said, work has already started on that and "you will start seeing results in that direction because clearly we want to... As a billion people democracy, we want to have a strong global voice".
Prasar Bharati is a statutory autonomous body and the public service broadcaster of the country. All India Radio and Doordarshan are the two public broadcasters, governed by the Prasar Bharati Act."So, it is extremely important for India to have its own public broadcasting platform which has a presence globally, and with many of the audiences worldwide going digital, you will probably see that happen first on the digital front and then, we will take it across," Shekhar said. He further said the most urgent challenge for the organisation is to make the public broadcaster a 21st century modern organisation.
New technologies need to be brought in both in how "we communicate" and reach out to audience as well as internally how the operations are run, he said, terming it as "a very urgent task".According to Shekhar, in the next 2-4 years, there will be a lot of changes in the organisation and these measures will help deal with many pending legacy issues.