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Thursday, October 11, 2018

Radio Pakistan: home to forgotten music instruments and archives


Veena, also known as a Saraswati Veena
Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2018

The headquarters of Radio Pakistan in G-5 is home to musical instruments used by musical legends of the country and thousands of minutes worth of archives.

The announcement made for the birth of Pakistan at midnight on Aug 14, 1947 also marked the birth of Radio Pakistan. The announcement began with “this is Pakistan Broadcasting Service”.

It was converted into the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) on Dec 20, 1972 as a statutory body governed by a board of directors and the director general. The foundation of the existing headquarters was also laid at this time.

PBC has an extensive national network of AM, FM and SW stations covering 98pc of the population in around 80pc of the total area of Pakistan.

Broadcasts are made from the 20 studios in the headquarters in English, Urdu, local languages and regional languages including Tamil, Gujrati, Farsi, Dari, Bangla, Nepali and Sinhalese. China Radio also transmits its news and current affairs programmes from one of these studios.

Additiona story at: https://www.dawn.com/news/1437306