Four years since launch, uncertainty looms over Prasar Bharati News Service's fate

Four years after it was launched to serve as the newswire of India’s public broadcaster, uncertainty now looms over the fate of the Prasar Bharati News Service.

While it continues to function on paper, several employees working with Prasar Bharati told DH that it is close to a dissolution – its employees have been absorbed into different wings of the broadcaster earlier this month, following the resignation of its head Samir Kumar in April this year.

PBNS had over 25 people working with its editorial wing, in addition to 12-14 people in the graphics and technical section. These employees will now work with either Doordarshan or All India Radio; by June 9, the employees had joined their new assignments. “Over 15 employees were asked to join DD, while 10 have been shifted to AIR,” an official involved in the process said.

The decision to disband the news service, sources said, was taken by Prasar Bharati’s new CEO Gaurav Dwivedi, who took over the job in November last year. Dwivedi told DH that the move is to allocate resources better. “This is simply a reorganisation of our resources,” Dwivedi said.

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PBNS’s former head, Samir Kumar, who resigned on April 22 this year, had joined Prasar Bharati after serving as the CEO of Hindusthan Samachar, and had no prior experience in the field of media before his stint with Hindusthan Samachar. Kumar left without serving a notice period.

Several employees that DH spoke to said that they are uncertain about what comes next, and some said that there was speculation within the Prasar Bharati that many will lose their jobs. Among the employees that were running the show were several interns, with just a handful of senior hands, said sources. Over six employees from the technical section and two from the editorial wing have resigned, and there are speculations that they are headed to a new venture that Kumar has started.

PBNS was launched formally in 2019 by Prasar Bharti to disseminate news and public interest stories in a multimedia format digitally and across various social media platforms. The decision to launch the news service was taken in 2016 by the Prasar Bharati Board.

Prasar Bharati has over 500 part-time employees, while Doordarshan has a countrywide network of over 600 employees. DD also has 39 regional units, with anywhere between 1 to 15 employees. “It was decided that we could use this new spool and also supply news to the market. It was a fine idea that couldn’t take off,” a senior official of the Prasar Bharati told DH.

The PBNS was disseminating news free of cost, and a plan to start a subscription model was under process. Earlier this year it courted controversy when it signed an exclusive two-year contract with the RSS-backed news agency Hindusthan Samachar, which will run till 2025. Opposition parties derided the move, calling it an attempt to “saffronise” news.

In 2020, Prasar Bharati had cancelled its subscriptions to news agencies Press Trust of India and United News of India. UNI, though, has been battling mounting financial troubles and is in the midst of an insolvency process. The I&B ministry, responding to a Parliament question earlier this year, had said that Hindusthan Samachar will be among multiple sources of news for Prasar Bharati.

With a concerted push on social media channels, some of the PBNS’s tweets on its contentious Twitter handle were at a point treated as the government’s versions on certain topics. “The service, however, could not go beyond a Twitter handle. PBNS could not even start a website,” said an employee.