The Indian Diaspora is 20 million strong and spread across 110 countries and 5 continents. In September 2000, the Ministry of External Affairs appointed a High Level Committee to study the Indian Diaspora and to recommend measures for forging a constructive relationship between India and its Diaspora. In its Report, submitted to Hon’ble Prime Minister Sh. Atal Bihari Vajpayee , the Committee recommended that ‘Pravasi Bhartiya Divas’ should be observed on the 9th day of January every year in recognition and appreciation of the constructive economic, political and philanthropic role played by the Indian Diaspora. The date was chosen because it was on this day that Mahatma Gandhi, himself a Pravasi Bhartiya in South Africa for almost two decades, finally returned to India to lead the Country’s freedom struggle.
The First Pravasi Bharatiya Divas was celebrated during 9th to 11th Jan’ 2003 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi and inaugurated by Hon’ble Prime Minister. The aim of the event was to interact with all NRIs/PIOs to understand their sentiments about India, their expectations from India, and to propose a policy framework for creating a more conducive environment for their sustained and productive interaction with India and her people.
The co-organisers of the event were FICCI and Ministry of External Affairs (NRI Division) . National Informatics Centre was approached to webcast the event live for millions of interested audience across the globe. The event was attended by high level dignitaries and went on for three days with parallel running sessions, events, press briefings and entertainment programmes. Some of the key speakers included the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Union Ministers for Finance, External Affairs, Communications & IT, HRD, I&B, Health, Tourism etc along with Chief Ministers of various States.
Webcast Support
With the experience of successfully webcasting important international events such as UNFCCC’s COP-8 (for details, refer Informatics January’2003 issue) under its belt, NIC is being regularly approached for providing support of live/on-demand webcast of the events organized by the Government. The organizers of Pravasi Bhartiya Divas also approached NIC for providing the complete webcast support for the entire 3 days event. A webcast support team of 15 officers from NIC was delegated the task and a Web cast control room was setup on first floor of Hall no. 11 at Pragati Maidan.
All the plenary sessions were broadcasted live on the internet including inaugural and special sessions. Other parallel sessions were also streamed to provide an on-demand webcast facility.
Network Setup
LAN : Local network of 100 Mbps was setup with 6 nodes which included four streaming workstations and two other client machines for testing and network control.
WAN : The webcast control room at Pragati Maidan was connected with NIC Data Centre via 4 Mbps RF connection and 2x2 Mbps Leased line. The leased line was used as front end and RF connection was used as back end to provide the fail-safe network between webcast control room and NIC Headquarters.
Streaming from Live Source
A video agency was providing the live coverage of sessions through their video cameras. All the media streaming workstations were connected with live audio/video source. These workstations were receiving the audio/video signals through Osprey 210 cards. Helix producer was used to stream the audio/video and webcast the live event to Helix streaming server located at NIC data center.
A website (http://indiadaylive.nic.in) was developed for live webcast of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas providing links for the Live and On-demand streams . This website was dynamic database oriented and controlled by in house developed Activex control.
The entire exercise of providing webcast facility was highly appreciated by the audience and the dignitaries who applauded NIC’s efforts in making the event a big success.