NEW DELHI: Prasar Bharati has instructed the news wings of both All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan (DD) to cover all important events simultaneously and then share the inputs.

Confirming this, Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar said the instruction had first been given over a year earlier and admitted that there were still cases where this was not being done.

He said the directive included events like lectures or lecture demonstrations, biographical works, and the best performances of any artiste.

Meanwhile, he told Radioandmusic.com that the pubcaster was considering a proposal to provide a scroll free-of-charge to cultural organisations to announce their forthcoming programmes on DD Bharati.

Sircar said in answer to a question that Prasar Bharati was examining how music available in the archives of AIR and DD could be exploited by putting it online digitally.

He said DD alone had over 200,000 hours of recordings in its archives. Of this, 4000 hours were ready to be published and another 20,000 had been digitally restored.

Answering another question, he said short wave radio had to be kept alive for diplomatic reasons but medium wave was gradually being moved to FM so that all 850 million mobile users in the country will get access to this. Vividh Bharati had already been put on FM.