Government opens the floor on new rules for Prasar Bharati’s engineers

NEW DELHI: India’s information and broadcasting ministry has thrown open a 30-day comment window on a fresh set of recruitment rules governing the engineers who literally keep All India Radio and Doordarshan standing. A circular dated 25th June, issued from the ministry’s Kartavya Bhawan office in New Delhi, formally invites stakeholders to weigh in on the draft Prasar Bharati Civil Construction Wing (Group A) Recruitment Rules, 2026, the regulatory framework that will determine how engineers are hired, promoted and deputed across the public broadcaster’s construction wing.

The move follows an earlier circular issued by Prasar Bharati itself on 24th June, which had already opened its own comment process on the same draft. Under a 2015 office memorandum from the Department of Personnel and Training, any proposal to frame or amend recruitment rules must sit on a ministry website for 30 days specifically to solicit public feedback before it can move forward, and this latest circular is the information and broadcasting ministry fulfilling that requirement on its end.

Stakeholders have been asked to send their comments directly to Prasar Bharati by email within 30 days of the circular’s issuance, while also copying the ministry on the same submission. The circular carries the signature of Mihir Kumar Jha, under secretary to the government of India.

The draft rules themselves, set out in an accompanying gazette notification, would supersede three older sets of regulations dating back to 1988 and 1990, rules that have governed engineering recruitment at All India Radio and its Civil Construction Wing for decades. In their place, the new framework lays out a single, consolidated structure covering five categories of Group A posts: chief engineer, superintending surveyor of works or superintending engineer (split across electrical and civil streams), and surveyor of works or executive engineer (again split by stream), with an additional engineer officer track feeding into the chief engineer post.

The numbers attached to these roles are not small. A chief engineer sits at level 13A of the pay matrix, translating to a salary band of Rs 1,31,100 to Rs 2,16,600, while superintending-level officers sit at level 12, drawing Rs 78,800 to Rs 2,09,200. Executive engineers and surveyors of works occupy level 11, with pay running from Rs 67,700 to Rs 2,08,700. Every one of these posts is designated a selection post, meaning promotion is not automatic but runs through a formal selection process. Recruitment will overwhelmingly happen through promotion of existing departmental officers, with deputation from other central or state government departments as the fallback route, capped at a maximum tenure of three years and an upper age limit of 56 for deputationists.

The rules also carry standard but notable clauses tucked into the fine print. A disqualification provision bars anyone who has entered into a bigamous marriage from appointment, subject to exemption where the marriage is valid under the personal law applicable to both parties. The Central Government retains a general power to relax any provision of the rules for specific categories of people, and existing reservations and age relaxations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, ex-servicemen and other protected categories remain fully intact and unaffected.

For an institution responsible for keeping the country’s airwaves and screens running, this consultation is the unglamorous but essential plumbing work behind the scenes, the kind of bureaucratic housekeeping that rarely makes headlines but quietly decides who gets to build and maintain India’s public broadcasting infrastructure for years to come. Stakeholders now have a month to make their voices heard before the rules are set in stone, and in Indian government circles, that window rarely stays open for long.