MUMBAI: Gyan Vani, the FM radio channel initiated by the Human Resources Development ministry and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) with the help of Prasar Bharati, is all set to roll out six channels on Wednesday. This would bring the total number of Gyan Vani stations to 37 in the country.

Gyan Vani will launch six stations in Agra, Chandigarh, Jalandhar, Srinagar, Tiruchirapalli and Thiruvanthapuram. The stations would be inaugurated at 2.30 pm tomorrow, on 10 February 2010 by Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Choudhury Mohan Jatua and IGNOU Vice-Chancellor Rajasekharan Pillai would be chief guest at the event. The event will be relayed live on all Gyan Vani stations across India 

Gyan Vani radio consultant Arun Joshi Joshi mentions that the inauguration of six stations of Gyan Vani also marks completion of ten successful years of television channel Gyan Darshan. Gyan Darshan started with four hours of broadcast initially and today broadcasts content for 24 hours. We have four channels catering to different cross section of audiences, GD1, GD2, GD3 and GD4. The test transmissions for the new channel- GD5 is underway and we might soon flag it off. The new channel would be dedicated to environmental conservation, science and technology."

The content broadcast on Gyan Vani is contributed by Radio Netherlands, Deutsche Welle, national level institutions such as NCERT, NIOS and State Open Universities.

Referring to the hours of broadcast, National Institute of Amateur Radio associate director Jose Jacob states, The hours of broadcast on Gyan Vani vary from station to station. Usually, the content is transmitted from 6 am to 10 am in the morning and 6pm to 10 pm in the evening. The morning broadcast is usually repeat telecast of programming from the previous evening....

Elaborates Joshi, There is emphasis on locally generated programmes at Gyan Vani as we cater to the rural India. Apart from the sourced content, Gyan Vani broadcasts IGNOU for an hour. The number of hours of broadcast also depends on the local generation of content, for example Kolkata staion broadcasts about 16 hours of content because of its strong local generation....

Gyan Vani stations are also available on the Direct to Home (DTH) platform of Doordarshan Direct Plus to ensure greater reach of these educational channels all over the country. Asserts Joshi, Gyan Vani has received great response for the radio interactive programmes and we have callers from across the country since its availability on the DTH platform. The distant learning courses designed by IGNOU for the lesser privileged rural population has also provided impetus to Gyan Vani....

In March 2000, when FM frequency licenses were auctioned, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had been given a frequency for educational broadcasting in each of the 40 cities. The ministry handed the task to IGNOU as it already had some experience telecasting education on Gyan Darshan. IGNOU started broadcasting in Coimbatore, Lucknow and Vishakhapatnam and this was to expand to 40 other cities in two years.