"Manthan" premieres on Doordarshan in India

Deutsche Welle (DW) launches its first television series in Hindi on September 8. "Manthan" will focus on science, technology, the environment and medicine and will be aired every Saturday at 10:30 a.m. on Doordarshan National (DD-1) - the flagship channel of India's national broadcaster and the most widely available terrestrial television channel in India."This is a milestone for DW in India," said Petra Schneider, DW’s Director of Sales and Distribution. "We have been offering news content in Hindi for nearly 50 years now and providing television programming with a local emphasis was a logical next step."

Manthan is produced by DW’s Hindi team in Bonn and will cover all aspects of science and technology - with a special focus on the latest developments in Germany and Europe. The show's anchor is Isha Bhatia from Chandigarh.

In addition to presenting the latest scientific developments, the Manthan team will also report on the different aspects of everyday life in Germany and comment on the sometimes surprising differences between Germany and India. Multimedia content from the series will also be available online at DW’s Hindi website, www.dw.de/hindi, as well as being distributed by DW’s online partners.

Doordarshan is India’s public broadcaster with more than 26 satellite channels and 1,135 local terrestrial transmitting stations. It provides television services to more than 140 million homes in India. In addition, the DD DTH platform, a free-to-air service, is received in more than 10 million households. DW - the 24/7 English news and information channel of Deutsche Welle - is also available on this platform.

In late 2011, Tripurari Sharan and Erik Bettermann, the Directors General of Doordarshan and Deutsche Welle signed a comprehensive partnership agreement to strengthen bilateral cooperation in the field of television.