Angelika Newel, the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle's distribution head for Asia and Australia, said the group was interested in promoting TransTel, a service that supplies German programmes to TV stations across the world.

"German relations with the Indian film industry are nearly zero. We do have excellent relations with the state broadcaster Doordarshan," Newel, here to take part in the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), told IANS.

"Getting in touch with India's TV industry is rather hard. Our specialisation is in the field of documentaries. We would be happy to have TV viewers here accessing the quality productions of German stations."

TransTel distributes programmes produced by itself as well as those broadcast by the ARD and ZDF networks of Germany. The programmes are edited and adapted to meet global audiences, including in Asia.

There are some thousand hours of documentaries and reports in fields like science, medicine, history, environment, arts and entertainment.

"Our children's programmes always have an educational background. They often include elements such as teaching youngsters how to treat the environment, or how to cope in situations of conflict," said Newel.

She said every two years or so, Doordarshan took up about 100 hours of TransTel programming.

The Deutsche Welle group's radio service broadcasts in 30 languages, and other services the broadcaster offers include a satellite TV channel and the decade-old dw-world.de website.

Newel said the idea of a "film bazaar" at IFFI had attracted Deutsche Welle's participation.

"There's a very good one in Cannes (which Goa is trying to model itself on)," she said. "This is a starting point, and it's still a very small bazaar."

Newel felt the bridge-building activity between India and continental Europe, specially Germany, is "not yet happening", and ironically the spurt in the number of local Indian channels meant that overseas programming like Deutsche Welle was just "put aside".

"We do broadcast in the digital format. But since that requires special equipment to receive it (which few have), it's as good as not being there," she admitted.

Newel said Germany offered another perspective to global issues, compared to channels like BBC and CNN.

"One new audience is Indian students wanting to study in Germany, who can get a lot of information on www.campus-germany.de. Most students here don't realise that education in Germany is free, though one needs to first learn the language," she said.

Deutsche Welle was set up in 1953, in the aftermath of World War II, and it claims to have one of Europe's most modern broadcasting centres in Bonn, which does programming in languages like Bengali and Urdu.

The group's relay stations around the globe include one at Trincomalee in Sri Lanka and DW-TV is received by over 200 million households. Deutsche Welle also runs German language courses and has been broadcasting since 1964 via radio in Hindi.

--Indo-Asian News Service