NEW DELHI - Radio Taiwan International held its biennial Listeners' Club Meet in Delhi on Saturday.

Previously held in March 2006 in New Delhi and Kolkata, the RTI delegates visited Chennai and Kolkata along with New Delhi this year. Speaking to the members of the listeners' club, RTI chairman Yu Cheng said, "We aim to achieve international cooperation through our programming and news. Although Taiwan has a population of over 22 million, we still haven't been granted a place in the WHO."

Added Andrew Cheng, Director of the Information Division of Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in New Delhi, "Taiwanese journalists aren't even allowed to cover the World Health Assembly proceedings. We are eager to again become a member of the WHO and we require international support for our cause."

RTI is a national radio station and is under the Central Broadcasting System (CBS), which is the national broadcasting system of Taiwan. CBS was established in 1928 in Nanjing (mainland China) as the voice of the Kuomintang (KMT) government. After the conclusion of the Second World War which saw the surrender and withdrawal of Japanese forces, the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC) resumed their civil war. The KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and the Central Broadcasting System moved with them.

The RTI currently broadcasts in 13 languages over various regions of the world. Among the broadcasting langauges include French, German, Indonesian, Thai and Japanese The language for broadcast in India is currently English.

"We have been suggested by listeners over our tour across India to broadcast in Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. It is too early for me to give you concrete information but I will make sure I put this forward to the relevant Government agencies back in Taiwan," said Cheng.

"Currently, we look at Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese as very important languages for broadcast as we have about 300,000 immigrant workers in Taiwan from the South-East Asian region and many of them have married taiwanese locals," said Carlson Huang, Chief of Foreign Languages section and Enlish Program host in the RTI.

"The RTI is government owned and works similarly to the way the BBC or the Deutsche Welle networks run.Our main aim in broadcast is to provide information to listeners about Taiwan, its culture and its people. We look to establishing international cooperation through our work," said Huang on the fuctionalities of the RTI.

Although, the members of the club were generally very happy with the programming content, there was an issue that most of them brought up. The issue of there being distubance in the signals between 0930 and 1000 Hrs and that there are times when the signals just fade away at those times. The station currently broadcasts at two frequencies viz. 9785 kHz and 11550 kHz and the problem was experienced at the 9785 kHz frequency.

"This is a serious problem as we see it. We will talk this over with our technical team when we get back and we certainly would want to rectify them at the soonest. Also, although we have got many positive response on our programming content, we will not rest on our laurels but will work towards making the content even better," promised Cheng.