All India Radio

Akashvani When the Indian State Broadcasting Service (ISBS) was renamed to All India Radio, Rabindranath Tagore rechristened it Akashvani, the voice that comes over from the skies, in a poem penned for the inauguration of Kolkata's shortwave service. The term Akashvani was also used in the context of radio by M. V. Gopalaswami in 1936 when he established India's first private radio station at his residence, "Vittal Vihar," located about 200 yards from the current All India Radio station in Mysore. In 1956, Akashvani was adopted as All India Radio's on-air name. With its literal meaning in Sanskrit as "voice from the sky," the name was considered highly fitting for a broadcaster. The suggestion to use Akashvani was given to Gopalaswami by the Telugu/Kannada scholar Rallapalli Ananta Krishna Sharma, who was working as a Telugu pandit in Mysore Maharaja College and later went onto tune Annamacharya's kritis as well. During the British Raj Broadcasting commenced in June 1923 during the British Raj with programmes by the Bombay Presidency Radio Club and other radio clubs. According to an agreement on 23 July 1927, the private Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd (IBC) was authorised to operate two radio stations: the Mumbai station, which began on 23 July 1927, and the Kolkata station, which followed suit on 26 August 1927. The organisation went into liquidation on 1 March 1930. The government took over broadcasting facilities and launched the Indian State Broadcasting Service (ISBS) on 1 April 1930, initially on an experimental basis for two years. It became a permanent service in May 1932 and was later renamed All India Radio on 8 June 1936.|alt=Distant photo of building complex with tower On 1 October 1939, the External Service began with a broadcast in Pashto. It was intended to counter radio propaganda from Germany directed at Afghanistan, Iran, and Arab nations. The Dhaka station in Eastern India, in what is now Bangladesh, opened in 1939. This station catered to and nurtured the pioneers of Bengali intellectuals. The foremost among them, Natyaguru Nurul Momen, became the trailblazer of the talk show in 1939. He wrote and directed the first modern radio play, "Rupantar (The Transformation)" for this station in 1942. This play was later published in 1943 Pooja Edition (Sharadia Issue) of Anandabazar Patrika. In December 1940, the Standing Finance Committee sanctioned a sum of Rupees 9,30,000 for the establishment of a new headquarters of the All India Radio in Delhi. The new “Broadcasting House” of AIR at Parliament Street in New Delhi was inaugurated in February 1943. In 1956, All India Radio (AIR) was officially renamed Akashvani, and its headquarters were renamed Akashvani Bhawan. After Independence When India became independent in 1947, the All India Radio network consisted of only six stations: Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Lucknow, and Tiruchirappalli. The three radio stations in Lahore, Peshawar, and Dhaka remained in what eventually became Pakistan after the partition. At that time, there were approximately 250,000 radio sets in India. In August 1947, All India Radio hired its first female newsreader, Saeeda Bano, who read the news in Urdu. On 3 October 1957, the Vividh Bharati service was launched by All India Radio to compete with Radio Ceylon. The total capital invested by the All India Radio so far on the experimental Television service inaugurated on 5 September 1959 is about Rs. 2.14 lakhs, eight commercial licenses and four domestic licenses for television receiver sets have so far been issued by the Posts and Telegraphs Department. Television broadcasting commenced in Delhi in 1959 under the aegis of AIR, but was split off from the radio network as Doordarshan on 1 April 1976. FM broadcasting began on 23 July 1977 in Chennai, and expanded during the 1990s. Deccan Radio (Nizam Radio 1932), the first radio station in the princely Hyderabad State (now Hyderabad), went live on 3 February 1935. It was launched by Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, boasting of a transmitting power of 200 Watts. On 1 April 1950, after Operation Polo, Deccan Radio was taken over by the Indian Government, and in 1956, it was merged with All India Radio. Thereafter, it has been known as AIR-Hyderabad (100 kW). ==Domestic services==