New Delhi, Oct 29 (IANS): All India Radio free news SMS will now be available in four other regional languages - Assamese, Gujarati, Tamil and Malayalam - from Wednesday.

Launching the free SMS service, Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said the government had initiated innovative approaches in reaching out to the people through multiple media platforms.

He said the endeavour was to address the communication needs, to enter into a dialogue with different cross sections of society and address the aspirations of young people.

Javadekar said the SMS service is intended to provide instant communication to the public in a language and form understood by them. The service also reiterated the richness and reach of each of the languages introduced by AIR, he added.

He said that mobile phones acted as a tool of empowerment and keeping in mind the reach and connectivity and added that AIR could consider a customized news and related information to varied sections of the society, said an official statement.

Earlier, AIR had launched SMS service in English on Sep 9 last year. It launched the free SMS in five other Indian languages on Sep 19 this year - Hindi, Marathi, Dogri, Sanskrit and Nepali. The service has already touched a database of over 300,000 subscribers.

This newly launched service can be availed by registering on the website of All India Radio viz. http://newsonair.nic.in/smsservice .

SMS can also be sent for registration in following format to 7738299899:

AIRNAMEAGEGENDERCODELANGUAGECODE

Different codes for the SMS are as follows:

GENDER CODES : M for Male/F for Female

LANGUAGE CODES: A for Assamese, G for Gujarati, ML for Malayalam, T for Tamil, H for Hindi, M for Marathi, D for Dogri, S for Sanskrit, N for Nepali.