All India Radio History: How AIR Shaped India’s Story

India’s first broadcasts were run by amateur clubs, not the state. The Radio Club of Bombay put out programmes in June 1923. The Calcutta Radio Club followed in November 1923, and the Madras Presidency Radio Club began a service on 31 July 1924. Receivers were expensive, transmitters were weak, and the audience was mostly hobbyists and colonial officials.

The first commercial attempt was the Indian Broadcasting Company. Its Bombay station was inaugurated by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, on 23 July 1927, and the first news bulletin in India went out from that station the same day. A Calcutta station followed on 26 August 1927 with a bulletin in Bengali. The company could not sell enough licences to pay its costs, and it went into liquidation on 1 March 1930.

The government stepped in a month later. The Indian State Broadcasting Service started on 1 April 1930 under the Department of Industries and Labour, at first on an experimental basis. In August 1935, Lionel Fielden, a BBC producer, became India’s first Controller of Broadcasting. Delhi’s station opened in January 1936 and aired its first news bulletin on 19 January 1936. On 8 June 1936 the service was renamed All India Radio. The Central News Organisation followed on 1 August 1937, with Charles Barnes as its first news editor.

The word Akashvani (“voice from the sky”) also comes from this period. It was the name of a private station set up in Mysore in 1935–36 by M.V. Gopalaswamy, a psychology professor. Accounts differ on who coined it, and writer N. Kasturi is often credited. AIR adopted Akashvani as its own on-air name in 1956.

The Second World War changed what radio was for. AIR set up a Monitoring Service in 1939 to listen to foreign broadcasts. It launched its External Service on 1 October 1939 with a Pushtu broadcast aimed across the north-west frontier, and in 1943 it created an External Broadcast Unit under the Director of News. By 1945 the Central News Organisation was putting out bulletins in several Indian languages. On 24 October 1941, AIR was moved to the Department of Information and Broadcasting.

This was government radio in a colony at war. Nationalists had to go elsewhere to be heard: during the Quit India Movement in 1942, Usha Mehta and her colleagues ran the underground Congress Radio from Bombay for about three months until police traced and shut it down. From 1942, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose also broadcast to India from Germany and later Southeast Asia. From its start, AIR was an official voice. Nationalists had to reach listeners from underground or from abroad.

At Partition, Peshawar, Lahore and Dacca stations went to Pakistan. India kept six stations: Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Lucknow and Tiruchirappalli. They had 18 transmitters between them and covered about 2.5% of India’s area and 11% of its population. There were only about 2.75 lakh licensed radio sets in a country of roughly 34 crore people. On the night of 14–15 August 1947, AIR broadcast Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech from the Constituent Assembly.

On 12 November 1947, which was Diwali, Mahatma Gandhi made the only visit of his life to a radio station. He could not travel to the Kurukshetra camp, where lakhs of Partition refugees were living in tents, so he spoke to them from AIR’s Delhi studio for about 20 minutes. India has marked 12 November as Public Service Broadcasting Day since 2001. Less than three months later, after Gandhi’s assassination, AIR commentator Melville de Mellow described the funeral procession live, in one of the most remembered broadcasts in AIR’s history.

In September 1948, the Central News Organisation was split into a News Services Division and an External Services Division, a structure that still exists.

In the early 1950s, AIR’s programming reflected the tastes of its minister. B.V. Keskar, Information and Broadcasting Minister from 1952, wanted radio to promote Indian classical music. He saw Hindi film songs as vulgar and Westernised, first capped them at a small share of airtime, and then removed them from AIR almost completely. AIR started the National Programme of Music on 20 July 1952, the National Programme of Talks (English) on 29 July 1953 and the first Radio Sangeet Sammelan in 1954. These programmes brought Hindustani and Carnatic musicians to audiences far from their home regions. The National Programme of Plays followed on 15 August 1956.

Listeners who wanted film songs went elsewhere. Radio Ceylon had started a Hindi service in 1950, and its commercial programmes, especially Binaca Geetmala, which started in 1952 with Ameen Sayani as presenter, drew huge audiences across north India. AIR was losing listeners to a foreign station playing Indian music. On 3 October 1957, AIR launched Vividh Bharati (then the All India Variety Programme), with film music at its core. Commercial advertising came to Vividh Bharati on 1 November 1967. Prasar Bharati now describes it as the country’s largest entertainment radio network.

Indian television started as part of AIR. An experimental service from a Delhi studio began on 15 September 1959, the date Doordarshan uses (Prasar Bharati’s AIR chronology lists 1 November 1959). For 17 years radio and TV were one organisation, until Doordarshan became a separate department on 1 April 1976.

Radio’s reach depended on transmitter power. AIR commissioned a 1,000 kW superpower medium-wave transmitter at Calcutta (Mogra) on 15 August 1969 and another at Rajkot on 8 January 1971. The Yuv Vani youth service began in Delhi on 21 July 1969. On 26 October 1962, during the war with China, AIR relaunched its daily commentaries as Spotlight and Current Affairs, adding explanation to its news bulletins.

The first FM service began experimentally in Madras on 23 July 1977, fifty years to the day after the Bombay station opened. Hourly news bulletins started on 15 August 1985, the same year all AIR stations got satellite receiver terminals. The National Channel began on 18 May 1988, and the Integrated North East Service on 8 April 1989. The 100th station opened at Warangal on 2 March 1990, and the 150th at Berhampur, Odisha, on 1 April 1993. AIR Delhi began its first phone-in programme on 10 January 1993, which let listeners call in and speak on air.

On the morning of 26 June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced the Emergency on All India Radio, telling listeners there was no reason to panic. For the next 21 months, newspapers faced censorship officers. AIR needed no censor, because it was already a department of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, headed from June 1975 by V.C. Shukla.

The best-known example involved Kishore Kumar. In April 1976 the singer declined a request to perform at a government programme promoting the Emergency. According to the Shah Commission, which investigated Emergency excesses, his songs were then kept off AIR and Doordarshan from May 1976. The blackout eased after he wrote to the ministry that July. Shukla later accepted responsibility before the commission. After the Emergency, AIR introduced broadcasts by political parties in 1977, and the demand for an autonomous broadcaster led to the Prasar Bharati Act of 1990.

The Prasar Bharati Act was passed in 1990 but took seven years to come into force. Prasar Bharati came into existence on 23 November 1997, with Akashvani and Doordarshan as its two constituents. Its charter lists objectives including safeguarding “the citizen’s right to be informed”, presenting “a fair and balanced flow of information”, promoting national integration, and covering agriculture, rural development, health, science and India’s languages.

Competition came slowly, then all at once. From 15 August 1993, AIR sold time slots on its FM channel in Delhi and Mumbai to private producers. That experiment ended in April 1998. Licences for fully private FM stations followed, and the first ones went on air in 2001. Meanwhile AIR went online. It launched an internet information service on 2 May 1996, began real-time audio on 13 January 1997, put news on the telephone and the internet in February 1998, launched a digital satellite home service in 2002, and started AIR on DTH on 16 December 2004. On 1 April 2004, Kisan Vani started from 12 stations, carrying crop, weather and market information for farmers.

The best-known radio programme of the smartphone era is Mann Ki Baat, the Prime Minister’s monthly address, first broadcast on 3 October 2014. It runs on AIR’s national and regional networks, with regional-language versions, and is also streamed and posted on social media. Its 100th episode aired on 30 April 2023. Supporters see it as radio showing it still matters. Critics point out that a public broadcaster regularly carries a head of government’s address.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, AIR’s regional stations carried health advisories, lockdown rules and school lessons in local languages. That mattered in areas where broadband was unreliable.

In May 2023, the Akashvani Director General’s office told all stations to stop using “All India Radio” on air. The name Akashvani, which the Prasar Bharati Act already uses, became the only official name. The network is also available on the NewsOnAIR app, DTH and live web streams. 8 June 2026 marked 90 years since the name All India Radio was adopted.