MUMBAI: Among The first to leave the NDTV fold after Rajdeep Sardesai is one of the two NDTV India channel heads (production), Rajen Garabadu , who has just put in his papers after nine years at the helm. Garabadu will now proceed to Broadcast News to take over as executive producer at the newly floated Rajdeep Sardesai-Sameer Manchanda venture which is backed and funded by Raghav Bahl's TV 18.

Garabadu will be in charge of all production related activities including designing the work floor, deciding on the state of art technology, manpower, training and editing graphics. Sources say Garabadu is scheduled to join Broadcast News after a fortnight.

During his nine year stint at NDTV, Garabadu was part of the invigorated Big Fight and was part of the team responsible for mopping up several awards for Prannoy Roy's company like the Asian Television Award 2003 for Best Talk Show for three consecutive years, and the Indian Telly awards for the same category in 2004.

Garabadu took over as channel head (production) at NDTV India in December 2004. Previously, he was the producer and director of the Big Fight since the first show aired on NDTV 24X7.
He joined in as production assistant, junior- assistant producer, assistant producer, associate producer, programme producer to producer and later elevated as channel head (production) of NDTV India.

He played a key part in the rejuvenation of Big Fight managing its look and feel of the show, although the core aspect remained the same. He was also part of Nation-Wide on Star News (which has been discontinued after NDTV ceased being a content provider to the Rupert-Murdoch's Indian news broadcast arm).

Garabadu was also involved with Question Time India, which airs on BBC World. This show was earlier commissioned to NDTV. At present it is being produced by Karan Thapar's company ITV.