The Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Prizes aims to promote the excellence in radio and TV production in order to raise educational and cultural standards and to strengthen international understanding among the people of the ABU member countries and regions. This year the Award Presentation was held virtually on 10 December 2020 in Youtube Live, Facebook Live and Zoom Webinar.
The categories for radio include Drama, Documentary, News Reporting, Community Service Announcement (CSA), Docudrama, On-Air personality and Radio ABU Perspective Award. Every year, experts in the field of broadcasting from different countries were invited as judge for this competition. On the final judging panel, Smt. Sujata Paranjape (Assistant Director, Programme, AIR Pune) was nominated as Prasar Bharati representative, accompanied by broadcasters from Germany, Thailand, China, Korea and England. She explained about this great opportunity and responsibility as follows -
This year in all seven categories, 126 programs were submitted to ABU. All these programs were scrutinized by the Preliminary Committee. They selected the best four events from each section. There were different groups of examiners for each category e.g. Experts from England, Iran, Japan and Myanmar examined Drama category. Representatives from Hong Kong, China, Italy and Australia took part in examining the Documentary category. Thus, a total of 29 programs, including the best four from each category and the best five from the News reporting category, were shortlisted for the finals. It was the job of 6 judges to decide the first number in each category by listening to all these 29 programs and scoring them. Most of the programmes were other than English language. Details of the purpose of each event, expected audience, summary were made available to us. In addition, a complete text of non-English programs was received. For Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc. programs, I would first read the information and then the complete text and then, even if I didn't understand the language, I would listen to the program with the text in front. We had to figure out how the sounds used in the programme were, whether there was variety or uniformity in them, how effectively the sound effects were used, and how effective the program was in terms of overall content. Except two or three programmes, the order of preference for the rest of the programs was almost the same of all judges. Although our country, culture, and language were different, our approach to the program was very similar.
In the totally depressing atmosphere of Covid and when I was about to retire, I got this opportunity and it was a memorable experience for me, said Smt. Sujata Paranjape.
Contributed by :- Smt. Subha Dharmadhikari, EA, AIR Pune.