The contents of Swayamprabha Channel - 15 with the theme of ‘Capacity Building…

Concept: SWAYAM PRABHA is the Ministry of Education's bouquet of free direct-to-home (DTH) television channels that telecast curriculum-based educational programmes round the clock. It is built on a one-theme-per-channel design: under the allocation currently in force each channel number carries one fixed subject theme, and a block of consecutive channels is entrusted to a single national coordinating institution that produces and supplies the content for that whole block. A question of the form “which channel is provided by whom” is therefore answered by locating the channel number inside its coordinating block, not by guessing which institution's name sounds closest to the theme.

Application: Since the reorganisation of 1 September 2023, IGNOU, New Delhi has been the National Coordinator for a block of six higher-education channels, and the IITs hold the engineering and science block:

Within IGNOU’s block the six themes are CH-11 Social Sciences and Humanities, CH-12 Basic and Applied Sciences, CH-13 Professional Education, CH-14 State Open Universities and Gyan Darshan, CH-15 Capacity Building and Teacher Education, and CH-16 Skill and Vocational Education. Channel 15 therefore sits inside IGNOU’s block, and IGNOU feeds it from its Staff Training and Research Institute of Distance Education (STRIDE) and its School of Education, which address the training needs of functionaries of the higher-education system. The contents of Channel 15 are provided by IGNOU, New Delhi.

Cross-check: the other institutions named in this item sit in different parts of the scheme.

• CEC, New Delhi is the Consortium for Educational Communication, the UGC’s inter-university centre for educational media; the SWAYAM PRABHA channels it coordinates lie outside IGNOU’s CH-11 to CH-16 block. Note also that CEC expands to Consortium for Educational Communication, not to any “Central Educational Council”.

• IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur supply engineering, technology and science content, which sits in the CH-17 to CH-38 block.

• SWAYAM PRABHA (the DTH television channels) is a different scheme from SWAYAM (the online MOOCs portal); an institution’s role in one does not carry over to the other.

Note: lists that circulate from the older 32-channel arrangement, in force before the reorganisation of 1 September 2023, number the channels differently. The allocation above is the one currently published on the official SWAYAM PRABHA portal and on IGNOU’s own Swayam Prabha page, and it is the basis of this item.