New Delhi, Sep 19 (IANS): After the launch of its English language free news SMS alerts, All India Radio (AIR) Friday launched a similar service in five Indian languages - Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Dogri and Nepali.

Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar Friday launched the free news SMS service of AIR News Services Division.

Speaking on the occasion, Javadekar said the SMS service aimed at providing important news to subscribers in their preferred language on their mobile phones.

He suggested that AIR should aim to disseminate news in other regional languages through the SMS service and run a campaign through newspapers and Doordarshan news to create awareness about the service. This would enable a large cross-section of society to access news on real time basis, he said, a ministry statement said.

Referring to the vision outlined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 'Digital India', Javadekar said the free news SMS service constituted a critical component of the 'Communicating India' campaign.

Communicating India was an important component of an outreach mechanism so as to enable the flow of quality information to the people across platforms, the statement said.

AIR launched its free news SMS service in English Sep 9 last year and it has already touched a database of over 3,000,000 subscribers, the statement said. People desiring to avail the service can register at the website http://newsonair.nic.in/smsservice.

They can also send an SMS to 7738299899 in the following format:AIRNAMEAGEGENDERCODELANGUAGECODE.

The different codes for the SMS are as follows:
Gender Codes: M for Male, and F for Female. Language Codes: H for Hindi; M for Marathi; D for Dogri; S for Sanskrit; N for Nepali. The News Services Division is also building a database of subscribers of its SMS service for providing customized messages, the statement said.