First educational channel to be launched soon

First educational channel to be launched soon
UNITED NEWS OF INDIA

NEW DELHI, JAN 2: The country's first educational TV channel will be beamed from a satellite earth station constructed at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)'s electronic media production centre (EMPC).

The channel is, however, awaiting commissioning of the uplinking facility. Announcing this, IGNOU vice-chancellor A W Khan said in his millennium message on Sunday that the free-to-air channel `DD Gyan Darshan' will have eight hours of original programming with eight hours of repeats. Though the channel is being launched in collaboration with Doordarshan, which is supplying the hardware and the transponder link on satellite free of cost, the nodal agency for the new channel is the EMPC. The Human Resource Development Ministry will reimburse the cost of running the channel. DD Gyan Darshan will be beamed via the C-band on INSAT 2B. The earth station is located in the Sanchar Kendra complex, which the outcome of an indo-Japan friendship treaty project, fully equipped for production andtransmission of electronic media software, apart from being a national resource centre.

The software for the channel will come from various sources: the Consortium for Education Communication and the University Grants Commission, the NCERT and its instructional educational television units, the Indian Institutes of Technology, Departments of Space, Science and Technology and so on.

The aim of the channel will be to reach different segments of the population: pre-school, school, non-formal system learners, teachers, university students, technical and management students, adult learners and others. A tentative programme schedule had also been worked out for the weekdays and the week-ends.

Regular time-slots for popular employment-oriented informative programmes offered by the government and private sector covering such as career guidance and counselling, consumer education, workers' education will be in the sponsored category.

An Human Resource Development Ministry source said more than 100 sources ofeducational material had already been identified, and these included foreign missions, educational institutions, research bodies, Doordarshan, Central ministries, non-governmental organisations, and affiliated bodies of the United Nations.