The Hindi service of BBC Radio, one of the oldest radio stations broadcasting to India, will close in a couple of months. It began broadcasting in 1940 and its last transmission will be on March 31, 2011.
Sources told this newspaper that 30 BBC employees who used to work on the Hindi service in India are likely to lose their jobs. There is a lot of uncertainty over the fate of many correspondents and stringers spread across northern India as well as in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Rajasthan and Bihar. The BBC Hindi footprint in India is now reduced to a miniscule online presence — the BBC Twitter site, with just 735 followers.
The BBC confirmed on Wednesday that nearly 650 World Service jobs would be lost in “cutbacks”. Five other foreign language services are due to close — covering Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, the Caribbean and Portuguese services for Africa. The BBC further announced: “Radio broadcasts in China, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey will be axed, and shortwave broadcasts will cease in Hindi. The Persian and Arabic services will work much more closely together with all evening radio programmes axed from the BBC Arabic service.”
Just over six years ago, in 2004, the BBC had pumped in millions of pounds to set up a state-of-the-art office in New Delhi to serve India and the larger South Asian region. The BBC Hindi service currently broadcasts four times a day — at 6.30 am, 8 am, 7.30 pm and 10.30 pm IST. It is available on shortwave and medium wave radio transmitters and via cable television. BBC Hindi programmes are produced both in its London and New Delhi studios. Millions of Hindi speakers across the world access BBC Hindi programmes in both text and audio through bbchindi.com.
BBC Hindi broadcasts two morning and two evening programmes live from its New Delhi studio. One of its most popular programmes is the live half-hour interactive Aapki baat: BBC ke saath.
Senior BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who has often been interviewed by BBC HIndi Radio, said the move was “unfortunate”. He felt the service “has a major impact in India’s politics and is popular in rural areas”. In the remote forest area of Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh, in the Maoist heartland, BBC Hindi Radio is one of the most popular news sources for the ultra-left rebels.
BBC Global News director Peter Horrocks said in a statement that the closures weren’t a reflection on the performance of individual services, but were due to a cut in funding by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. “It is simply that there is a need to make savings due to the scale of the cuts. We need to focus our efforts in languages where there’s the greatest need and where we’ve the strongest impact,” he said.
The announcement was just days after the BBC announced 360 online job losses. The BBC World Service, which started broadcasting in 1932, currently costs £272 million a year and has an audience of 241 million worldwide across radio, television and online.