India's first Hindi podcast targeted towards the Hindi-speaking audience in the country and abroad has been launched.


The brainchild of Maharashtra based blogger duo Debashish Chakrabarty and Shashi Singh Podbharti looks to provide a coverage of news and views about Indian language blogging, tools and technology, current affairs and the entertainment industry. Podbharti.com has also partnered with English Podcast The Indicast.

Aditya Mhatre and Abhishek Kumar, co-producers of The Indicast are fairly positive about the ti-up. "There are lots of podcasts being done purely in French, Spanish etc, but there has been none in an Indian language, so it's a great idea to produce a Hindi-centric podcast. Podbharti fills in a huge gap", said Mhatre.

"The Hindi blogosphere had been playing around with the idea since long, I am glad that the dream could take a shape now. Podbharti is a tribute to the growing strength of Indian languages on the net. Bringing a podcast in your own language not only gives a sense of empowerment but also opens avenues for the spread of the language", said Chakrabarty. "Of late Hindi blogging has started getting the much needed attention from the mainstream media. Through Podbharti we hope to add another dimension to the phenomenon and tell the world about this formidable force", added Singh.

The duo is aware of the fact that bandwidth is an issue but they aim to reach an audience that may not have the best hardware available to listen to Podbharti. They hope to achieve crisp programming with minimal audio file sizes, while not compromising with the quality and presentation style.

In its debut episode, Podbharti has presented a retrospective talk on Hindi blogging completing 4 years, where popular Hindi blogger Anup Shukla presents a bird’s eye view of the happenings in the blogosphere that has grown almost 25 times its size in 2003. Next, Ravi Ratlami, dedicated Hindi blogger and Technology enthusiast, presents a nipping primer on the Hindi Transliteration tool introduced recently by Google in its Blogger.com service. And finally Shashi Singh presents an interesting report, with quotes from the NDTV bloggers, on the recent Mohalla Controversy in the Hindi blogdom where discussions on communalism took an ugly turn adding bitterness to the whole debate. The complete episode could be downloaded as an MP3 file or listened to online at http://www.podbharti.com using the online players.

The site also provides syndication feed enabling users to subscribe through podcatchers and listen to the podcasts at leisure.

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