NEW DELHI: Over 600,000 subscribers have already registered for the free All India Radio News on SMS service of the News Services Division (NSD) of All India Radio (AIR).

The SMS service in English was launched on 9 September, 2013 and the database reached about 300,000 by August 2014. NSD started sending news headlines through SMS in nine more languages in September and October 2014 and testing for six more languages is almost complete.

In September last year, the free News SMS service was extended to Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Dogri and Nepali.

Within a short span of a month, nearly 100,000 people registered for the service. Four more regional languages namely Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, and Assamese were added to the SMS service in October.

In this service, NSD has been providing national/international news headlines through SMS in 16 languages namely Gujarati, Assamese, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Dogri, Sanskrit, Nepali, English, Bengali, Odia, Urdu, Punjabi, Arunachali and Kashmiri. As a next step, NSD is planning to expand the service to its Regional News Units (RNUs) for giving local news in regional languages on SMS.