MUMBAI: In its endeavour to tap creative talent exclusively for UTV, the production house is in the process of hiring creative minds. Building upon this, UTV has roped in Smile TV's programming head Ronita Mitra who has been appointed as UTV's creative director.

At the outset, Mitra will primarily be handling creative outputs for the production major's kids' programming for Hungama.

Commenting on the move, Mitra says, " I am very interested in kids programming which is very different from the cliched soaps genre. This niche has a huge potential and I wanted to be hands on with the content being produced rather than be on the channel side."

UTV COO Vikas Varma says, " With UTV moving from seven and a half hours of programming to about 23 hours, the need of the hour was definitely to have people who could deal with the amount and kind of content to be generated. Also, Ronita was very comfortable with the kids genre. A lot of her is very child like in her attitude and therefore understands children's psyche very well."

Mitra, prior to Smile TV was with Bag Films.

Interestingly, the production house has also recruited Rajesh Beri, a well known script writer in the television fraternity who is known for Saajan Sajani on Zee, Cats on Sony, Kehta hain Dil on Star Plus