New Delhi, March 26: After months of watching Doordarshan’s Urdu channel make little impact, Prasar Bharati has now decided to elevate it to the list of channels that cable operators must carry.

Along with that, DD Urdu will be turned into a 24-hour channel.

No deadline has been set for these moves to “re-energise” the channel, but Prasar Bharati officials say this could happen around August 15 when the channel completes a year.

At its launch on Independence Day in 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had commented on the time it had taken for the country to have an Urdu channel. But he said it was good it was finally there. “Der aaye, durust aaye,” he said in Urdu.

But the channel — a mix of entertainment and news, and several hours of repeat programmes — failed to create a buzz, even in the targeted Urdu-speaking communities. The reason: DD officials reckoned that it was hardly visible. If the cable operators carried it, they did so on the fringes of the bandwidth spectrum.

Now, Prasar Bharati has decided to invoke the provisions in the Cable Television Networks (Regulations) Act, 1995, that make it mandatory for cable operators to carry at least two of Doordarshan’s terrestrial channels and a regional channel on their prime band.

Urdu would be notified among these three channels at least in some regions of the country, Prasar Bharati sources said. The choice of the three must-carry DD channels varies across the country: in Delhi, the chosen ones are DD National, DD News and DD Bharati.

Prasar Bharati — that runs Doordarshan and All India Radio — says it also plans to pick the Urdu channel for transmission on the digital video broadcasting hand-held mode. This enables mobile phones with the right kind of chip to receive up to eight Doordarshan channels. Doordarshan-on-cellphone is likely to be available in the capital from May, and then in three other metros.