Prasar Bharati has apparently decided to give the fledgling DD Bharati a shot in the arm with some original content.

The channel has commenced a live phone in show titled Meri Baat in association with several schools across the country. Open to students in the age group of eight to 20 years, the programme is telecast five days a week from Wednesdays to Sundays, between 6 and 7 pm. The forum includes an audience of 25 children and 10 parents and teachers, besides three panelists who could be educationists, counsellors and doctors.

DD Bharati has also launched the shooting of an in house programme titled Kisse Ek Hazar, a series of stories sourced from across the world. Touted as an ‘endless world of stories, games, puzzles‘, the series will also see a set of itinerant story tellers travelling villages and towns, singing old and contemporary tales of great deeds. The 13 episode series is directed by Irpinder Bhatia, while music has been composed by eminent musician B V Karanth.

The channel is also sprucing up its cultural segment, the second in its three-prong vision of projecting the health-culture-children wealth of the country. It has launched a weekly cultural show Kala Parikrama, a Sunday evening show that is a round up of cultural events in the fields of art, culture, music and literature in and around Delhi. The programme, produced by Vimal Issar and presented by Shivani Wazir Pasrich, is telecast Sundays at 8 pm and repeated on Mondays at 10 am.

One point. If DD Bharati is being promoted as a national channel, celebrating India‘s culture, how does a weekly round-up of the cultural events in the capital qualify for a special slot.

The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) has restrained Doordarshan Kendra Delhi from transferring specialist programme executives to non programme production related jobs.
The restraining order applicable for a week from 30 May, follows a petition by Satish Vats, a specialist programme executive in music with DD, challenging Prasar Bharati authorities‘ act of putting specialists on the jobs other than the ones for which they were recruited by the Union Public Service Commission.

According to a report in the Free Press Journal newspaper, the tribunal has restrained DDK Delhi director Basharat Ahmed and chief producer BR Puri from executing their order, which would transfer UPSC selected specialist executives to non-programme related jobs in the tranmission cell of DD.

The petition, filed through DD Programme Staff counsel Jog Singh, will come up for hearing on 7 June, the report adds.