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Hasan urges India to facilitate broadcast of BD pvt TV channels


Bangladeshpost
Published : 05 Nov 2019 08:55 PM | Updated : 05 Sep 2020 02:25 AM

Information Minister Dr Hasan Mahmud on Tuesday urged his visiting Indian counterpart Prakash Javadekar to remove barriers of broadcasting Bangladeshi private TV channels in West Bengal state and other parts of India where cable operators visibly created obstacles for their airing, reports BSS.

In a joint media briefing after a meeting with Javadekar, he said the issue of broadcasting the Bangladeshi channels featured their talks when he pointed out that West Bengal’s cable operators were demanding “high fees” virtually barring the Bangladeshi TV channels there.
“He (Javadekar) said he would deeply look into the issue,” Hasan said, joined as well by Bangladesh’s State Minister for Information Dr Murad Hasan at Bangladesh Secretariat.

Hasan added that Indians now could watch BTV programmes “but the viewers particularly of West Bengal could not watch the Bangladeshi private channels though there is no barrier of the part of Indian Government”. India’s Information and Broadcasting Minister Javadekar is also in charge of the country’s Environment, Forest and Climate Change while now he is on a visit to Dhaka to join an environment conference in Bangladesh capital.

“We had a very good discussion on many topics – cultural and political particularly on film industry and television,” the Indian minister said. Javadekar added that India by now started broadcasting state-run Bangladesh Television (BTV) throughout India with free dish while Bangladesh also started airing the India’s state-owned Doordarshan (DD) TV.

“We also discussed about two films based on Bangladesh’s Liberation War and on Bangabandhu . . . I invited him (Hasan) to India and he will come very soon and more progress will be done,” he said. Javadekar said he particularly invited Hasan to India’s Pune to visit the some very good film institutes’ and archives.

“We sought cooperation to make the Bangabandhu Film City more dynamic and he (Javadekar) assured us to give all out cooperation to this end,” Hasan said. He said the meeting also discussed about the progress of two films under the joint initiatives of the two governments. Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka Riva Ganguly Das and Bangladesh’s Information Secretary Abdul Malek were present in the meeting.