AIR completes eighty-five years on air

While the medium for news broadcast has undergone a paradigm shift from newspapers to cyber media, old-timers still swear by the radio.

It all started in 1923, with the Radio Club of Bombay broadcasting its first programme. In 1927 a broadcasting service was formed on an experimental basis in Bombay and Calcutta, under an agreement between the Government of India and the Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd. On July 23 the same year the broadcasting service — called 7BY — began transmitting the first ever news bulletin in India. It was aired from the Bombay Station, and this was the first ever radio broadcast in India. Lakshmi Jayant, who retired recently after 39 years of service as a newsreader in the All India Radio said, “7BY was liquidated in less than three years and then the government took over the company. What we know as the All India Radio (AIR) today was established in 1936 and was renamed Akashvani in 1956.” Working with the organisation for almost four decades, Lakshmi has a lot of memories. She feels that “the authoritative tone” of the announcer was so compelling that one had to believe that this was ‘The News’. “It was literally Akash-Vani (voice from the sky), implying god’s voice, for us,” she recalls with a hint of nostalgia.

All India Radio launched Vividh Bharati in October 1957 . All India Radio Station in Coimbatore was started in 1977 with a variety of contents. According to N Tamilvanan, programme head, AIR, Coimbatore, “Those days we had many more educational programmes for farmers on agricultural sciences. We subsequently launched our flagship channel ‘Rainbow’ at 103 MHz FM on August 15, 2000. Rainbow FM is what we call an infotainment channel that balances information and entertainment.”