NEW DELHI: The News Service Division of All India Radio has increased the number of languages in which free SMS news headlines are available to a total of ten.

Last month, the free SMS service, which was launched in English by AIR in September last year, increased to include five Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Dogri and Nepali. The news will be sent by AIR News Services Division.

It has now also commenced the service on a pilot basis in Gujarati, Assamese, Tamil and Malayalam.

The service has already touched a database of over 400,000 subscribers.

The News Services Division is also building a database of subscribers of its SMS service for providing customised messages.

The different language codes are as follows:G- Gujarati, A- Assamese, T- Tamil, ML- Malayalam, H- Hindi; M- Marathi; D- Dogri; S- Sanskrit; N- Nepali.

Previously, Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar stated that the SMS service is aimed at providing important news to subscribers in their preferred language on their mobile phones which would allow large cross-section of society to access news.

All India Radio’s free News SMS service was launched on September 2013. The service provides AIR news headlines free of cost to its subscribers on mobile telephones. There are two or three headlines in each SMS, which also carried a public service information message.