MUMBAI: Dr Prannoy Roy's NDTV has won recognition in two diverse streams of news channel activity.
NDTV's investigative report "Education For Sale in Maharashtra, India" was Highly Commended in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Broadcasting Awards 2004.
The report was entered in the category for the Award for Exceptional News Feature 2004.
The commendation went to NDTVs Sindhu Manesh, Anand Rao and Srikanth G. Rao who worked on the report. Using a hidden camera the team revealed that seats in top medical colleges were being sold for large amounts of money by state government ministers, politicians, principals and college registrars. The judges were impressed by the teams bravery, their meticulous research and the scale of the corruption revealed on film. A fallout of the report was the Supreme Court of India's clamping down on the colleges.
The other front where NDTV has won laurels is from the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC).
The IBC Award for Cost Effective Engineering 2004 went to NDTV for a low cost satellite contribution and return path DSNG (digital satellite newsgathering) system. It replaces an existing service supplier, does not rely on third party operators and is resilient to poor power and telecom facilities.
The concept and design were by NDTVs systems manager, Rahul Deshpande and senior broadcast engineer Jay Chauhan and the project was executed by a team led by chief engineer, Jawahar Lal, deputy chief engineer, Dinesh Singh and producer Shayne P Singh among others.
A statement issued by NDTV says this is the first DSNG network relying entirely on MPEG-4 encoding.
The judges were Martin Salter, chairman of the IABM and IBC conference committee, Peter Owen, chairman of IBC Council, Mike Lumley, Royal Television Society, David Woods, EBU and the panel was chaired by Neil Dormand, CBA Technology Consultant.
The judging panel, while announcing the award, said they thought that the quality of the presentation from NDTV was excellent and that the achievement is a model to broadcasters in similar situations.
There was a detailed cost comparison of the chosen techniques against the alternatives, the NDTV statement says. Not only were technical difficulties overcome but also the outcome was very cost effective in terms of capital and operation.
