After ending its subscription with news agencies PTI and UNI, India’s National Broadcaster, Prasar Bharati is believed to be working towards starting it’s own news service.
In the past, there have been occasions when the Modi regime have felt that the news agencies, particularly the PTI, were not able to do the needful, say our reliable sources in the government. So to reduce reliance on PTI, the government envisaged its own news agency – the Prasar Bharati News Service (PBNS) – and prepared a proposal. For testing purposes, PBNS made its debut on Twitter earlier in April 2019 as a “Digital News Service of India’s Public Broadcaster- Breaking Alerts, Digests & curated Developing Stories from across the Globe”.
Sources in the government claim that the endeavour will be transformed into launching a full-fledged news agency, utilising the available huge network of Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) that together includes around 1100 reporters across the country. So far, for some administrative and bureaucratic reasons, the proposal has been stuck. Now that PTI and UNI are formally out, the proposal of news agency under Prasar Bharati will be revive, reveal senior government officials
By having its own agency, the government feels it might be easier to manage the narrative, especially at the global level, with several international media organisations trying to create a negative perception about the Modi government.
