MUMBAI: The Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) will now offer distance education programmes for its students over state owned All India Radio (AIR).

The directorate of distance education of the university Tuesday entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AIR in this regard.

To start with, a half-an-hour long programme will be broadcast every Sunday at 5 p.m. by 31 AIR stations in seven states - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka , Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

"The programme will go on air Jan 9, which is the foundation day of MANUU," university vice-chancellor A.M. Pathan told a news conference after signing the MoU with P.S. Gopalakrishna, station director, AIR, Hyderabad.

The vice-chancellor said the duration of the programme would be increased depending on the response from the students. Last year, the university had launched its educational programmes on Doordarshan Urdu channel.

"We started with the telecast of one programme a week but the number of programmes per week has gone up to four following the tremendous response it received from students," he said.

MANUU was established in 1998 by an act of parliament as a central university to promote and develop the Urdu language, provide higher, technical and vocational education in the Urdu medium and to provide focus on women's education.

K.R. Iqbal Ahmed, pro vice chancellor and director, distance education, MANUU, said the university had a wide distance education network with 134,000 students. It has nine regional centres, five sub-regional centres and 140 study centres all over the country.

The university has already established an examination centres at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and is in the process of setting up more examination centres in the Middle East. It also proposes to start examination centres in Canada, New York and Chicago.