In an embarrassing blooper, Doordarshan used the Australian government’s “MyGov” website’s logo instead of the Indian MyGov website for the broadcast of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann Ki Baat programme on Sunday.
The mistake was noticed only after the telecast was uploaded to the YouTube channel of the state broadcaster. The footage was replaced with an edited version.
‘Inexcusable mistake’
“It was an inexcusable mistake that happened during the editing. We have corrected it since then. And I have asked for a written explanation for the same,” Shashi Shekhar Vempati, Chief Executive Officer of Prasar Bharati, told The Hindu .
The two logos are distinct from each other in font and colour. The Australian logo is in dark green and cream. The Indian MyGov website has a multi-colour logo in green, blue, orange and purple with a line, Meri Sarkar , in Devanagiri.
Both the web portals have distinct functions. The Australian website offers access to online services of the Australian Taxation Office, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the Victorian Housing Register Application and so on.
The Indian MyGov portal is a citizen engagement platform to crowd-source governance ideas. The Prime Minister’s Mann Ki Baat address is in response to the ideas given by citizens on the portal. For example, in his address on Sunday, he invited ideas on how to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and urged citizens to send them to the website.
Doordarshan insiders tried to play down the blooper, saying it was not detected by any of the viewers during the broadcast or after being uploaded on YouTube. “It was hardly there for 45 seconds, no one noticed it and since then it has been deleted. It was purely a human error,” a senior official said.
