PUNE: For the last four years, Pune Akashvani has been engaging visually impaired students and officers to read news live on air.
This was for the fourth time that the Pune Akashvani celebrated the World Braille Day on Saturday by inviting the visually impaired to read the news live.
While talking to Sakal Times, Pune Akashvani Deputy Director (News) Nitin Kelkar said, “On Saturday, Gulab Kambale and Kavita Gavali read out the 7.10 am regional news bulletin which is relayed by Pune Akashvani throughout the State. This is our prime bulletin.”
“Actually, we first experimented with it in the year 2016 where the news were scripted in Braille language and were read out by a visually impaired person, Dhanraj Patil which was a recorded news bulletin, which we later aired,” he said.
“However, we did not make any announcement regarding it before the news bulletin, but in the middle of the bulletin we mentioned it. Now, we announce the names of the news readers for such special occasions. Our first visually impaired news bulletin received an over-whelming response,” he added.
“Actually, for the very first time, such an experiment was done by Ahmedabad Akashvani where they ran a recorded capsule. We replicated it and looking at the response, we decided to give training to Patil,” Kelkar said.
“Since Patil was a visually impaired instructor, it was easy to match his speed with ours and thus the process began,” Kelkar said, adding that in 2017 they decided to go live.
“While going live we had our usual newsreader reading the first half of the hard news. Then, in the second half, we would make an announcement that a visually impaired will read the rest of the news,” Kelkar explained.
“Of course, the closing of the news bulletin would be done by our news reader,” he said.
“In the same way on Saturday, when the World Braille Day was observed, we had live news reading by Kambale and Gavali,” he added.
The programme was carried out with help from Pune Blind Men’s Association.
Special arrangements were made in the studio for the special broadcast with news scripted in Braille.
“Now, we are thinking to go a step ahead in this direction. Soon, we will decide on it,” he said.
Meanwhile, India has the highest population of blind people in the world.
