Nine DSNG vans by flagged off Doordarshan

Doordarshan inducted nine new state-of-the-art broadcast vans to enhance its ability to provide real-time news. The vans were flagged off by the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Information & Broadcasting and Sports & Youth Affairs Col. Rajyavardhan Rathore (Retd.). Amit Khare, Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting; Supriya Sahoo, DG, Doordarshan; and other senior officials of the ministry were also present on the occasion.

Speaking on the occasion, the minister said that his government stresses on Act East Policy and a lot of development efforts are taking place in north-eastern parts of India in this regard. Deployment of more DSNG vans in North East will help in making the development stories from North East reach the people. As a part of fleet augmentation program to enhance the capacity of Doordarshan for live broadcasting, the nine new C-Band DSNG vans are capable of uplinking HD signals. These vans have been procured at a cost of `22.83 crore (at `2.54 crore each) through a global tender.

These DSNG units would enable Doordarshan to enhance its live telecast capability from the North-East as 4 of these DSNGs are for Gangtok, Kohima, Imphal, and Agartala. Since North-East is the focus area of the government, these would provide a boost to the news gathering as well as programming initiatives from the hitherto uncovered areas in the North East. Apart from this, new DSNG units are also being deployed at Allahabad, Visakhapatnam, Chandigarh, Jagdalpur and Pune.

Doordarshan has a fleet of 34 DSNGs which are deployed across the country. 16 operate in C Band while 18 operate in Ku Band. However, out of 34 DSNGs only two are capable of uplinking HD signals.