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The BBC World Service's Hindi short-wave broadcasts have been saved from the axe after the foreign secretary, William Hague, agreed to give extra money to the highly regarded international broadcaster.
Hague has agreed to give an extra £2.2m annually to the World Service for the next three years from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office budget.
This slightly reduces the impact of a controversial 16% cut in the World Service's FCO grant, announced as part of the government's comprehensive spending review in October.
The controversial World Service cuts have prompted sniping between the government and the BBC, with each blaming the other.
However, in recent weeks the new BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten, has been lobbying Hague about reducing the impact of the cuts on the World Service's Arabic, Somali and Hindi broadcasts.
The BBC Trust has also reallocated £9m of existing World Service funding to editorial investment over three years to counter the impact of the government funding cuts, following lower-than-expected restructuring costs and pension contributions.
Taken together this additional funding will help support what the World Service described as "priority frontline services", including short-wave Hindi broadcasts, which had been due to close as part of the cuts.
The money will also go towards the Somali service and World Service broadcasts to the Arab world, along with a small amount of investment in new digital services and "emerging markets".
Details of how this funding will be allocated is being worked out by the BBC.
The extra money means the World Service is now looking at reducing its £253m annual budget by £42m by the end of March 2014, rather than £46m. The BBC is due to take over funding the World Service from the FCO, using licence fee money, from 1 April 2014.
However, wide-ranging cuts will still be implemented, with five language services – Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa, Serbian, and English for the Caribbean – due to close.
In other areas, World Service radio broadcasts in languages including Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese will cease, with output switching to a mix of online, mobile and in some cases TV distribution.
In January the World Service announced it expected the cuts to result in up to 650 job cuts from its staff of 2,000 – with 480 post closures this year - and the loss of 30 million listeners around the world.
The World Service received support from an unlikely source earlier this week when Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi told the Radio Times that Dave Lee Travis's music request show on the BBC international station helped her get through years of house arrest.
Patten said: "As Aung San Suu Kyi said only this week, the World Service is a lifeline for those hungry for unbiased news and information about their country and the wider world. It is also an export for British values of fairness, accuracy and impartiality. I am delighted that we have been able to work with the foreign secretary to direct some more funding to these services. The additional money will help protect BBC services in the areas where they are most valued and needed.
"However, it does not mean that we will be able to restore all of what has been lost, and there will still need to be some cuts to the World Service as we have known it. We are determined that when we take full responsibility for funding of the World Service after 2014, it will have the priority it deserves."
SOURCE: BBC World Service's Hindi short-wave service saved from closure http://bit.ly/kKU6fT
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