The Information and Broadcasting Ministry today informed Parliament that it has released Rs 2.75 crore towards 'grant-in-aid salaries' to Prasar Bharati from January this year till date.
Similarly, between April 2017 and December 2017, the ministry had released Rs 1,989 crore towards 'grant-in-aid salaries', I&B Minister Smriti Irani said in a written reply in Lok Sabha.
She was replying to questions from Suman Balka (TRS) and Mullappally Ramachandran (Congress) on whether her ministry has not released funds meant for payment of salaries and whether Prasar Bharati had to pay salaries from its own contingency funds.
In her reply, the minister also said that several reminders have been sent to Prasar Bharati since March 2017 to sign an MoU, required as per rules and the recommendations of the Expenditure Management Commission.
However, now the ministry has received a revised MoU from Prasar Bharati that has been "considered in the ministry" and sent to them "with some modifications to take further steps" for signing the MoU with it, she added.
The ministry had issued a statement saying that Prasar Bharati had not signed an MoU with it as required by autonomous bodies getting grants-in-aid by the government.
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Prasar Bharati, the minister said, earns nearly Rs 1,400 crore per year which is their internal extra budgetary resource. The total financial requirement of the organisation are met by combining their internal resource with grant-in-aid from the Centre.
"Prasar Bharati has to pay for spectrum charges and satellite charges from their internal resource but for past several years (it) has not been making any payment to the Department of Space and Department of Telecommunication and the dues mounted to Rs 1,824.24 crore," the minister said.