Indian cricket skipper Sourav Ganguly plays football on the St Xavier?s College grounds. A Telegraph picture

Education Media Research Centre (EMRC), St Xavier?s College, Calcutta, has won the Best Centre award for the period 1997-2004 by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

The media centre was feted at the UGC-CEC Excellence Awards in recognition of the ?quality and number of programmes?. EMRC Calcutta has not only made the highest number of programmes for UGC, but also contributed to national as well as regional channels.

Father George Ponodath, director, EMRC Calcutta, said: ?Conviction, commitment and competence are the three Cs that drive this centre. The small but committed team is convinced that it can make a difference to the lives of people, through the programmes.?

EMRC, which has now been renamed Educational Multimedia Research Centre, has broadened its functions to include production of multimedia packages and e-content for webcasting, and will now be using EDUSAT (a satellite dedicated to education) to spread the power of the word.

?We want to reach more and more students, especially in the rural areas. We would like to give a voice to the voiceless as well as images to the sightless. India is the only country in the world to have a satellite dedicated to educational purposes only. If used properly, it has a tremendous potential as well as possibilities,? said Father Ponodath.

EMRC has a number of plans on the anvil, which include using the EDUSAT facilities to distribute educational feed to over 58 colleges all over the country. ?There are basically two types of programmes made by us ? syllabi and enrichment. The enrichment programmes go beyond and around the syllabus. They have wider variety, the type of programming we would really like to pursue,? he observed.

The centre, which is wholly funded by UGC, is well-equipped with modern professional tools to help the team produce such programmes.

?All the centres come under universities for their administration only. The financing is totally borne by UGC, but EMRC Calcutta is the only one whose administration is handled by a college, St Xavier?s,? said Father Ponodath.