News Broadcasting
Sri Lankan firm triumphs in BCC World’s competition
MUMBAI: A Sri Lankan firm which transforms elephant dung into eco-friendly paper, has won BBC World challenge 2006. This rewards businesses and projects that put something back into their communities.
‘Maximus’, based in Kegalle at the foothills of Sri Lanka’s central mountainous region, beat more than 800 other projects from 120 countries to win World Challenge 2006 and a US$20,000 grant from Shell. The company uses a range of unusual products, including elephant dung and bark from banana trees, to create a line of papyrus-like paper.
The notion’s far from quixotic. Sri Lanka is home to some 3,000 elephants, whose numbers are dwindling – due to poaching and conflict with farmers, who view them as very hungry pests.
To change that view, ‘Maximus’ created its “Peace Paper” scheme, which hires rural people to collect elephant dung, providing a financial incentive that helps reduce poverty and build tolerance. When cleaned, pulped and pressed, cellulose-rich elephant dung creates a beautifully textured, papyrus-like paper.
Part of the company’s profits goes back to the local elephant orphanage. More than 33,000 people around the world voted online in the World Challenge 2006 competition – run by BBC World and Newsweek, the weekly global current affairs magazine, in association with Shell. The competition searches for, highlights and rewards individuals or groups that have used enterprise and innovation to the benefit of local communities.
‘Maximus’ was voted as the winner while the two runners-up, which each received US$10,000, were ‘Cards from Africa’ in Rwanda and ‘NGO Dalit’ from Bangladesh.
The three companies were presented with their prizes at a special awards ceremony, filmed by BBC World, in The Hague. The World Challenge 2006 Awards ceremony will be shown on BBC World on 16 and 17 December.
BBC World Challenge began in 2005. BBC World, Newsweek and Shell have continued and expanded the competition into 2006. Nominations for the 2006 competition closed on 7 June. 816 nominations were received – a 79 per cent increase on last year’s nominations of 457.
This year’s competition attracted the greatest numbers of nominees from India (159), Philippines (56), Nigeria (47), USA (34), Kenya (32), South Africa (32), England (20) and Uganda (20).
12 finalists were chosen by a panel of expert judges as the best examples of community-based business, development or environmental projects. Their stories featured on BBC World globally in October and November 2006 and the channel’s 65 million weekly viewers were then invited to vote online for the most commendable and inspirational project.
Newsweek also mirrored the programmes’ content in a six-part series of advertorials about the 12 nominees, aimed at driving its readers to the online voting site. The campaign reached 1.5 million weekly readers across Europe, Asia and Latin America.
BBC World CEO Richard Sambrook says, “I have been amazed by the huge number of entries we’ve received for the World Challenge 2006, and equally inspired at the quality and diversity of the projects. This competition has again been extraordinarily successful, capturing the imagination – and the votes – of many thousands of BBC World viewers around the globe. We are delighted to be involved with such an inspiring project for the second year running and extend our congratulations to Maximus.”
Newsweek executive VP and worldwide publisher Gregory J. Osberg says, “World Challenge 2006 is about getting involved and making a difference at a grass roots level. Now in its second successful year, this global competition provides a forum for rewarding innovators who are actively seeking solutions to problems like poverty, hunger and pollution in the communities in which they live. Newsweek congratulates this year’s winner, Maxim
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI: Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
