The Central government is planning to set up a new channel, DD International on the lines of BBC World to communicate India’s point of view on global issues. The Centre believes that it will project India’s voice globally on significant domestic and global issues.
Sources in Prasar Bharati informed that the new DD International channel aims to be a truly global channel like BBC World and ensure that it is not just watched by the Indian diaspora but also by a global audience.
Doordarshan floated an Expression of Interest (EOI) seeking applications for consultancy service to provide a detailed project report for establishing the channel. According to the draft EOI, the objective of the channel is primarily to provide India’s point of view globally on contemporary issues of both global and domestic significance and telling the India story to a global audience.
After India’s status was downgraded from free to partly free by the United States government-funded NGO Freedom House, the Centre is also considering coming up with a home-bred world democracy report and a global press freedom index.
In March this year, the Centre issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the report by Freedom House that downgraded India’s ranking on its freedom index and classified it as a partly free country. In its statement, the government had said that the freedom in the world report is misleading, incorrect and misplaced.
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The report had given India a global freedom score of 67/100, after judging it on various political rights and civil liberties. The issues raised by the report included the alleged discrimination suffered by Muslims in India. It also pointed to arrests of activists involved in different movements, and actions taken against some NGOs based in India