Govt may rope in pvt DTH players to expand SWAYAM Prabha outreach

Concerned over the poor penetration of public Direct to Home (DTH) service provider – DD Free Dish, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry is considering roping in private service providers to expand the outreach of its ambitious SWAYAM Prabha project.

The final decision in this regard would be taken on Wednesday, after HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar holds detailed deliberations with major DTH service providers. Though the project was soft-launched by the ministry on August 15, it would be officially launched by PM Narendra Modi in coming weeks.

The SWAYAM Prabha project aims at operationalising 32 DTH television channels for providing high-quality educational content to teachers, students and citizens across the country. These 32 will be 24x7 channels and would telecast new contents for four hours everyday. The same content will be aired in six time slots during the day for the convenience of people.

“There are some technical issues that need to be sorted  out with major DTH players prior to rolling out the SWAYAM Prabha channels on their platform. The contents of the SWAYAM Prabha channels would be available for knowledge-seekers through their own DTH service providers for free,” an HRD official said.

The major DTH service providers called for the meeting are Tata Sky, DishTV, Airtel digital TV, Videocon d2h, Sun Direct and Reliance Digital TV to name a few. Pinning hope on the ambitious project, the official said, “The objective of this project is to provide contents in over 2,000 courses. But at the initial stage, content for 250 courses would be available. The contents cover all level of education such as school education, undergraduate, postgraduate, engineering, out of school children, vocational courses and teacher training, etc.”