Prasar Bharati

Prasar Bharati is India’s public service broadcaster, constituted under the Prasar Bharati (Broadcasting Corporation of India) Act 1990 and brought into existence on 23 November 1997. It operates two constituent networks: Doordarshan, the national television service, and Akashvani, the radio network formerly styled All India Radio. In May 2023 Prasar Bharati directed that references to “All India Radio” be replaced with “Akashvani”, the name used in the 1990 Act, and the corporation and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting now use Akashvani as the primary designation. Between them the two networks form one of the largest public broadcasting operations in the world.

Media assets

Television. Doordarshan’s national services, including DD National, DD News, DD India, DD Sports, DD Bharati and DD Kisan, together with regional and state services across India. Prasar Bharati’s DD Free Dish schedule for June 2026 identifies 47 Doordarshan television feeds, including national, regional and high-definition variants; that figure counts distribution feeds and is not necessarily the number of editorially distinct channels.

Radio (Akashvani). Approximately 470 broadcasting centres originating terrestrial programming in 23 languages and 179 dialects.

Distribution. DD Free Dish, India’s only free-to-air direct-to-home service and its largest distributed DTH platform.

Digital. WAVES, the corporation’s OTT platform; the NewsOnAir app; Prasar Bharati News Service; and PB-SHABD (Prasar Bharati Shared Audio-Visuals for Broadcast Dissemination), a syndication service launched in March 2024 supplying news material to other organisations across some fifty categories in major Indian languages.

Ownership and governance

Prasar Bharati is a statutory corporation wholly in the public sector, functioning within the portfolio of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, whose minister is Ashwini Vaishnaw. Doordarshan and All India Radio were departments of the ministry until the 1990 Act was brought into force in 1997.

General superintendence, direction and management are vested in the Prasar Bharati Board. The Act establishes fifteen positions: a part-time Chairman; the Executive Member, who serves as Chief Executive Officer; a Member (Finance); a Member (Personnel); six part-time members; a nominated representative of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; the Directors General of Akashvani and Doordarshan as ex officio members; and two members elected by Prasar Bharati’s employees. The Chairman serves a three-year term subject to an age limit of 70, the Chief Executive Officer a five-year term subject to an age limit of 65, and the Members (Finance) and (Personnel) six-year terms subject to an age limit of 62.

Under section 4 of the Act, the Chairman and the appointed members, excluding the ex officio, nominated and elected members, are appointed by the President of India on the recommendation of a committee comprising the Chairman of the Council of States, who is the Vice-President of India and chairs the committee; the Chairman of the Press Council of India; and one nominee of the President. The Act provides that the committee’s recommendations are binding for the purposes of these appointments. In practice the presidential nominee has been drawn from within the executive: when the committee met in March 2024 under Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, the third participant alongside the Press Council chairperson was the Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

That machinery has operated intermittently. The chairmanship was vacant from February 2020, when A. Surya Prakash reached the age limit, until March 2024, when Navneet Kumar Sehgal, a retired IAS officer, was appointed for a three-year term. Sehgal resigned on 2 December 2025, partway through that term, and the ministry relieved him of his responsibilities the following day. The post was then vacant until 2 May 2026, when the government appointed Prasoon Joshi, who was expected to assume charge on 4 May and who continued at the time of appointment to be publicly identified as chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification, a position he has held since 2017.

Gaurav Dwivedi, a 1995-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of the Chhattisgarh cadre, is Chief Executive Officer. He was appointed by the President in November 2022 for a five-year term and assumed charge on 22 November 2022, giving a term running to November 2027; he remained in post in 2026. The two other whole-time offices, which had previously been held in additional charge by the Chief Executive Officer, are now separately filled: Rajeev Roy assumed the role of Member (Finance) in January 2026 and Rajeev Bhardwaj assumed office as Member (Personnel) on 5 March 2026.

The board nevertheless remains incompletely constituted as publicly documented. In July 2026 Prasar Bharati’s official board page showed two part-time-member posts as vacant and did not list the two employee-elected representatives the Act provides for. The Act anticipates such gaps: it states that no appointment, and no act or proceeding of the Board, is invalidated merely by reason of a vacancy or a defect in the Board’s constitution.

Source of funding and budget

Prasar Bharati operates a hybrid model combining government appropriation with commercial income from advertising, DD Free Dish and digital services. Available audited and budgetary evidence shows that government support has historically exceeded the corporation’s commercial income and remains central to its financing: in FY2018–19 it reported revenue of about INR 49.5 billion, of which roughly 61 percent derived from state support and 24 percent from advertising and other commercial activity, and in FY2021–22 commercial revenues of about INR 13.5 billion stood against government support of about INR 27.6 billion. A complete audited revenue breakdown for 2025–26 was not identified.

In the Union Budget presented on 1 February 2026, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting received INR 4,551.94 crore, against a revised estimate of INR 6,103.02 crore for 2025–26. Of that, INR 2,291.88 crore was allocated to Prasar Bharati, to be spent on salaries, pensions and other expenses, and INR 509.24 crore to Broadcasting Infrastructure Network Development, a scheme implemented through Prasar Bharati covering digitalisation of the Akashvani network and expansion of DTH capacity, against a revised estimate of INR 550 crore for that scheme in 2025–26.

Editorial independence

Prasar Bharati has statutory autonomy without effective structural insulation. Section 23 of the Act permits the central government to issue binding directions to the corporation in relation to the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states and public order, including directions requiring it not to broadcast, or to broadcast, specified material. This gives the executive a lawful route to shape coverage of politically sensitive matters.

Appointments to the board and to senior editorial positions have been persistently politicised, and the governance record set out above, a chairmanship vacant from February 2020 to March 2024 and again from December 2025 to May 2026, and a board still incompletely constituted in July 2026, describes a body that has not consistently functioned as an independent governing organ. The Media Influence Matrix project has assessed that the corporation does not enjoy the editorial freedom the 1990 Act promised, and that successive governments have used it for favourable publicity while restricting critical coverage. A Media and Journalism Research Center content review covering November 2023 to April 2024 identified patterns of restricted or imbalanced visibility affecting opposition figures, including in coverage of parliamentary proceedings and state-level protests.

The Act provides for parliamentary oversight through a committee constituted under section 13, and for a Broadcasting Council to receive and consider complaints concerning programmes and unfair treatment. No evidence that a functioning Broadcasting Council was offering effective independent editorial redress in 2026 was identified. The corporation’s active accountability mechanisms, the Citizen’s Charters for Doordarshan and Akashvani, the Vigilance Wing and the Independent External Monitor, principally concern procurement and administrative integrity rather than editorial standards, and none provides an enforceable editorial firewall or protected tenure for editorial leadership.

AI and digital policy

Prasar Bharati has pursued digital expansion as a principal strategic priority. WAVES, launched on 20 November 2024 at the 55th International Film Festival of India in Goa, carries live television and radio, on-demand video and audio, games, publications and shopping through an integration with the Open Network for Digital Commerce. Prasar Bharati states that the platform offers content in more than 26 languages, with an interface supporting more than ten, and the corporation has moved to a streaming-minutes payout model for content partners. PB-SHABD supplies syndicated news material to other broadcasters and publishers.

No published Prasar Bharati editorial policy governing generative artificial intelligence, synthetic media, automated news production or the disclosure of AI-assisted content was identified.

Classification rationale

Prasar Bharati remains classified State-Controlled (SC). It is a statutory public corporation rather than a government department, but it remains financially dependent on substantial central-government support and operates within the portfolio of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Section 23 of the Prasar Bharati Act permits the central government to issue binding directions concerning sovereignty, national unity and integrity, state security, foreign relations and public order, including directions requiring or preventing particular broadcasts.

The Act contains meaningful formal safeguards. General management is vested in a statutory board; most appointed members are selected through a committee chaired by the Vice-President of India and including the Chairman of the Press Council of India and a presidential nominee, whose recommendations the Act makes binding; whole-time members have fixed statutory terms; and the Act establishes public-service obligations and parliamentary oversight. These arrangements distinguish Prasar Bharati from broadcasters administered directly as government departments.

Those protections have not produced sustained arm’s-length governance in practice. The chairmanship was vacant from February 2020 until March 2024 and again from December 2025 until May 2026. In July 2026 the official board page continued to show two part-time-member vacancies and did not list the employee-elected representatives required by the Act. Although the executive, finance and personnel posts were by then separately filled, the publicly documented board remained incomplete.

Prasar Bharati also lacks an effective editorial firewall preventing executive influence over politically sensitive coverage. The government retains statutory direction powers, provides the broadcaster’s principal financial support and exercises decisive influence over senior appointments. No functioning independent complaints mechanism capable of enforcing editorial autonomy was identified, despite the Broadcasting Council envisaged in the Act.

The corporation’s public-service mandate, statutory form and commercially generated income are important countervailing features, but they do not outweigh the government’s powers over financing, appointments and broadcast direction, or the evidence of limited editorial autonomy in practice. The State-Controlled classification therefore remains appropriate in 2026.

The classification will be reconsidered if the board is fully and consistently constituted, statutory appointment protections operate without extended vacancies, the government’s direction powers are narrowed or subjected to independent review, and an enforceable editorial-independence and complaints framework is established.

July 2026