NEW DELHI: Senior Indian Administrative Service officer J S Mathur will take over as Additional Secretary in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

Mathur comes in place of Rajiv Takru, who was transferred in August to the Health and Family Welfare Ministry as Additional Secretary and Financial Advisor.

The appointment has been approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet.

Mathur belongs to the 1982 IAS batch from the Madhya Pradesh cadre. He is presently Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. He has also served in the Law and Justice Ministry and as Chief Election Officer in Bhopal.

NEW DELHI: Manish Tewari, until now national spokesperson for the Congress party, has become the new Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Minister as Minister of State with independent charge.

The new I&B Minister will hardly have time to settle down as the four metros of India move nearer to the digitisation deadline of 31 October. Tewari will have to be firm as several local cable operators have sounded a possible law and order problem with a large number of consumer homes still not having digital set top boxes (STBs). They have been asking for an extension of the deadline but the government has resisted claiming that the STB penetration has touched as high as 85 per cent, a figure various industry experts have found hard to digest.

Tewari, like his predecessor Ambika Soni who resigned on Saturday to devote her energies to strengthening the party ahead of the General Elections in 2014, hails from Punjab. Soni is a Rajya Sabha member from the states, while Tewari is a member of the 15th Lok Sabha from Ludhiana.

Soon after the swearing in by President Pranab Mukherjee, Tewari said he would contact the outgoing Minister before saying anything about digitisation for which the deadline is 31 October. "I have not applied my mind to it so far. I will talk to all the stakeholders. First I will talk to the outgoing Minister Ambika Soni?.

S Jagathrakshakan, who was until now Minister of State for I&B, has been moved to New and Renewable Energy.

The I&B Ministry does not have a Minister of State at a time when cable TV digitisation is on the anvil. Furthermore, the Ministry has a vital role to play ahead of the elections.

Tewari, 47, is a first-time member of the Lok Sabha and was elected in May 2009. It is for the first time since independence of the country that Ludhiana has got representation in the central Government. As an MP, he has been member of several Parliamentary Committees.

His father late Vishwanath Tewari, a professor of Punjab University, was a freedom fighter and also a Member of Parliament and was killed by terrorists a few months before Operation Blue Star. His grandfather Tirath Singh had been a Minister in the Congress Government in Punjab.

Manish is married to Dr Naaznin B. Shafa, a Parsi who was also involved with the National Students Union of India (NSUI) along with him.

Tewari is a popular face on television as he has argued vociferously and impeccably for the Congress party on several issues.

Commencing his association with the party in 1981 through the NSUI while still in DAV College in Chandigarh, he became National President of the NSUI in 1988 and a member of the All India Congress Committee in 1991. He became Secretary of the AICC in 1997 and National President of the Indian Youth Congress in the following year when he was also made the national spokesperson for the Congress. His predecessor in the Ministry, Soni, had also held the post of President of the Indian Youth Congress in the mid-seventies.

His interests include pro bono legal assistance to the poor, and watching historical and period movies. He has contributed numerous articles on current and topical issues such as energy security, national and international security, nuclear disarmament, terrorism etc. to periodicals and addressed national and international seminars and conferences on these subjects

As a student, Tewari had been involved in swimming and running; and captained the Chandigarh and Punjab University teams to various National and Inter University Swimming and Water Polo Championships.

Tewari is widely traveled and has been to around 30 countries.

Meanwhile, eminent Telugu film actor K Chiranjeevi, the only other new face to be sworn in as MoS with Independent Charge, has been given the Tourism portfolio.

Kapil Sibal, who had been holding dual charge of Communications and Information Technology as well as Human Resource Development Ministries, has now been divested of HRD which has gone to M M Pallam Raju who has been promoted to Cabinet Rank.

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I&B Minister Ambika Soni resigns

NEW DELHI: Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni submitted her resignation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday, a day before the cabinet reshuffle.

Soni?s resignation comes just four days before the sunset date for analogue cable television in the four metros of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. Cable TV delivery in the four metros will mandatorily have to be via digital set-top boxes (STBs) from 1 November.

The Congress party has decided to utilise the servies of Soni in preparing the party for the 2014 general elections. Soni felt privileged to have been asked to work to strengthen the party cadres just over a year before the next general elections.

Soni, who will turn 70 on 13 November, is a member of the Rajya Sabha from Punjab. She became I and B Minister on 22 May 2009, and was tourism minister prior to that from 29 January 2006.

She has served as Indian Youth Congress president during emergency in 1975, and became a member of the Rajya Sabha for the first time in March 1976. She also served as general secretary of the Congress from 1999 to 2006.

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Manish Tewari gets charge of I&B ahead of digitisation

NEW DELHI: All applications for operating television channels or teleports have been given only 30 days from 25 May to furnish performance bank guarantee (PBG) and the permission fee as applicable.

An additional 15 days could be given only under exceptional circumstances, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has said.

It has clarified that no extension or correspondence will be entertained thereafter and those who fail to submit the PBG would not be given permission by the Ministry.

Earlier at the time of issuing the new Uplinking and Downlinking Guidelines on 5 December last year, the Ministry had said applications that are at various stages of processing for permission to operate television channels or teleports will be given a period of three months to ?ensure conformity? to the new Guidelines.

This followed a Delhi High Court order which had said time should be given till 23 March 2012 for those who had applied before 5 December 2011.

Furthermore, these applicants will have to give an undertaking to abide by the amended Guidelines, and the applications of those who fail to ensure compliance within three months will be rejected, Information and Broadcasting Ministry sources told indiantelevision.com.

Parliament was recently informed that a total of 681 television channels were operational in the country in April this year, out of a total of 825 television channels which had been permitted by the government as on 19 January this year.

A total of 116 channels are still within the prescribed limit of one year for operationalisation under the Uplinking/Downlinking Guidelines.

The Ministry has found 37 channels failed to become operational even after one year of permission. The licence of five of these has been cancelled, three had requested for extension of time against notice of cancellation, and 27 TV channels had sought extension for operationalising their channels and they have been asked to submit Performance Bank Guarantee. The permission of two channels has been withdrawn at the request of the concerned company.

The teleports have to pay Rs 87,500 per MHz per annum to the Wireless Planning and Coordination wing of the Communications and Information Technology Ministry for uplinking TV channels.

The country had a total of 430 news and current affairs channels as on 17 November last year including 35 channels of the national broadcaster, Doordarshan.

The foreign equity holding including FDI/FII/NRI investments should not exceed 26 per cent of the paid-up equity of the applicant company seeking permission for news and current affairs channels. In the case of teleports which must have a networth of Rs 30 million for the first teleport and Rs 10 million for subsequent teleports the foreign equity cannot exceed 49 per cent.

As far as entertainment channels go, the applicant company, irrespective of its ownership, equity structure or management control, would be eligible to seek permission. But the entity applying for permission for downlinking a channel, uplinked from abroad must be a company registered in India under the Indian Companies Act 1956, irrespective of its equity structure, foreign ownership or management control.

NEW DELHI: Under fire from broadcasters for its decision to recast policy guidelines for TV, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has said no final decision would be taken without addressing the apprehensions of broadcasters.

Reiterating the Government would prefer self-regulation by channels, I&B Minister Ambika Soni said: "We will be holding discussions with broadcasters? bodies."

The government had over the weekend toughened the Uplinking and Downlinking Guidelines by not only increasing the net worth criteria for both news and general entertainment channels, but also said renewal will be subject to a channel not having violated the Programme and Advertising Codes five or more times.

Both the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) and the Broadcasters Editors Association (BEA) described the move as a direct assault on the independence of the media.

The new policy guidelines for companies seeking to operate TV channels in India include revising the net worth criteria for uplinking of non-news and current affairs channels and downlinking of foreign channels from Rs.15 million to Rs.50 million for the first channel and Rs.25 million for each additional channel.

For uplinking of news and current affairs channels, the net worth criteria has been increased from Rs.30 million to Rs.200 million for the first channel and Rs.50 million for each additional channel.