The FTII Society has 24 members. (File) The FTII Society has 24 members. (File) Eleven months after appointing actor Anupam Kher as the chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry has nominated the 12 remaining members for the FTII Society. The nominated members include actors Danny Denzongpa, Divya Dutta, Kangana Ranaut, Arvind Swamy, singers Anup Jalota and Yesudas and academician Archana Rakesh Singh, among others, said official sources. The Society, headed by the FTII chairman, has 12 nominees, of whom eight are nominated under the ‘persons of eminence’ category while four are FTII alumnus. The Ministry usually nominates the members while appointing the institute chairman, but it had deviated from this tradition when Kher was appointed in October 2017. During its first meeting, the FTII Society’s members vote among themselves to choose members of the Governing Council (GC), the institute’s highest decision-making body, as well as the members of the Standing Finance Committee, which takes decisions about the FTII’s financial matters. “The fresh nominations completes the 24-member FTII Society, which comprises 12 ex-officio members and 12 nominees, who come from the field of art and culture. The tenure of the society is three years. Due to the delay in the nominations, the members will get only 18 months to do their work, as their tenure started from March 2017,” said an official from the I&B Ministry. Confirming her nomination, Archana Rakesh Singh, who heads the School of Communication Studies in Panjab University, said, “I am very happy about the nomination and I feel privileged to be on the FTII Society. I am looking forward to working with others on the Society.” As the nominees’ posts remained vacant in the FTII Society, the institute had functioned without either a Governing Council or a Standing Finance Committee. The FTII students’ association had been demanding the formation of the Governing Council and argued that in the absence of a GC, the institute was being governed by director Bhupendra Kainthola. They said Kainthola enjoyed “supreme authority”, instead of the FTII Society, as envisaged in the institute’s constitution. As reported earlier by The Indian Express, the institute administration had sent a list of proposed names for the FTII Society as early as January 2017, but the nominations remained pending for over one-and-a-half years. The list sent by the FTII administration included 30 names for the ‘persons of eminence’ category and eight for ‘FTII alumnus’ category. For all the latest Pune News, download Indian Express App

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