Radio Veritas Asia
Radio Veritas Asia (RVA) was inaugurated by the Southeast Asian Bishops' Conference on April 11, 1969. It is a private non-commercial Catholic radio station located in the Philippines. Its Urdu Service started its broadcast on August 14, 1987 in Lahore, Pakistan.
Its mission is to promote justice to the oppressed through programs with specific moral, religious and inspirational content, and to voice peace and harmony among the sects, races, and sexes through socio-cultural programs and to promote dialogue among different religions.
It has a mix of moral, religious, evangelical and socio-cultural, and entertainment programs on offer, as well as a few political, economic and informational programs.
Between 2007 and June 2011 it had received over 30,000 letters from listeners in Pakistan, over 3,500 from India and nearly 500 from other countries.[1]
Since 1991 the annual magazine of the Radio Veritas Asia Urdu Service has been housed in the office building of the WAVE Studio.[2] Most programs for Radio Veritas Asia's Urdu service are also recorded at the WAVE studio.[3]
Radio Veritas’ Urdu service is preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The celebrations will commence on 14 August 1987, and will run up to 14 August 2012. This will be for the Church in Pakistan, a great opportunity for evangelisation through the media, supplemented by the Catholic television program of Catholic TV.[4]
On October 9, 2011, more than 80 people from all over the country attended the 11th listeners’ conference of Radio Veritas Asia’s Urdu language service in Lahore. RVA’s Urdu service airs 13 morning and evening programs reaching listeners in Pakistan and India. In 2011 Father Nadeem John Shakir was the studio director.[5]
According to board member Kamran Chaudhry the impact of the Urdu service on interfaith relations has been positive.
The service is largely funded by the German donors Missio. Last year they announced a cut back of 10 per cent of their annual funding. The Center used to receive annual funding of 10,000 rupees from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Pakistan but this stopped six years ago.[6]
In 2015, it offers two 27 minute programs, one in the morning and one at night, dealing with health, culture, values, famous places in the world, personalities, social issues, literature, inventions and world news.
The 15th Conference of Catholic radio listeners was held on 21 September 2015 at Loyola Hall in Lahore. It was attended by 120 people from around the country. Bishop Joseph Arshad of Faisalabad and head of the Commission for Social Communications, addressed the conference invited the participants to build peace, tolerance and brotherhood in society via the radio.[7]