As Akashvani, the official radio broadcasting wing of Prasar Bharati under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, celebrates its 90 years, it should not be forgotten that it was born under a different name: All India Radio.

Akashvani (meaning voice from the sky), the delightful term adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s eponymous poem, entered the official vocabulary only two decades later, in 1956, and then coexisted with All India Radio. Until 2023. When an internal order severed ties with the original name and made it mandatory for the institution to be called only by the  new official name, Akashvani. In a satellite message, a section of the Prasar Bharati Act, 1990 (which came into force in 1997), was enforced, defining Akashvani as “the offices, stations and other establishments by whatever name called, which immediately before the appointed day formed part of or were under the Director General, All India Radio of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.” It was described as implementing an existing statutory position rather than introducing a new policy. However, the execution strangely occurred more than two decades later.

Celebrating 90 years of Akashvani, then, is technically inaccurate.

The institution may have been called only Akashvani since 2023, but what has turned 90 is what generations of Indians have known as All India Radio.

The distinction between the two names is more than just linguistic. It, perhaps, has little to do with affection for the poetry of Tagore, the Nobel laureate who was extremely critical of the extreme nationalism that later became the core philosophy of the RSS, the........

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