New Delhi : Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has issued licence clearances for 12 new channels private satellite TV channels in India on 31 August 2014, with this list of channels there will be 810 channels in the country against 798 till 28 August 2014.
Out of the total of 12 new additions, one is a news channel and the rest are non-news. Thus making a divide of total news and current affairs channels in the country as 398 and non-news and current affairs as 412.
Blue, ESPN, ESPN HD, Star Sports Highlights, Star Cricket Asia, Janam and Green TV are some of the new channels that have received clearances from MIB.
Moreover, the existing channels Star Sports 1, Star Sports 2, Star Sports 3 and Star Sports 4 have got permission for languages English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and any other language as permitted under the India Constitution.
Star Sports HD1 and Star Sports HD2 have got permission for languages English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo and Dogri. New channels under Star India that got permission- ESPN, ESPN HD, Star Sports Highlights and Star Cricket Asia also have permission for all the above languages.
With this the TV channels permitted for uplink from and downlink to India has also increased from 671 to 682 with 376 (earlier 375) news and 306 (earlier 296) non-news channels. The number of channels permitted for uplink from India has increased from 34 to 35 with six news and 29 (earlier 28) non-news channels.TV channels that can only downlink in India stayed constant at 93 with 16 news and 77 non-news channels
