Empowerment through information
Covering about 2.5 lakh people, Madhya Pradesh?s Radio Bundelkhand broadcasts to around 140 villages in Tikamgarh and Jhansi districts
OPERATIONAL SINCE 2008, Radio Bundelkhand?s key focus areas are agriculture, MGNREGA, education, health, women and youth issues, entrepreneurship and cultural development. ?We had no experience or any idea of how to run a radio station. But we did realise that the radio is a communication tool that can be used for social welfare and development,? says Anuja Shukla, who launched the station and was till recently its station manager. ?Empowerment through information was our motive,? she says. Started by the NGO Development Alternatives (DA), the station broadcasts to around 140 villages, covering about 2.5 lakh people in Tikamgarh and Jhansi districts. With the slogan Apna Radio Apni Batein, it churns out eight to nine hours of broadcast daily.
The station has trained more than 60 local volunteer journalists in the last four years and more than 400 local singers are registered with it. The library has 1,500 folk songs, many concerning social issues, collected from villages that the station serves. Because of DA?s backing and initial support in the form of a grant from UNESCO for setting up equipment and infrastructure, operational funding hasn?t really been a problem. However, the staff do concede that sustainability is an issue for community radio stations as their efforts to make the station self-sustaining through advertising and other community-based funding models haven?t really been successful.
A distinct voice
Inspired by stories of community radio acting as an agent for development, Henvalvani Community Radio focuses on local issues, problems and interaction
IT?S A frugal set-up. The microphone and transmitter jostle for space on a single table in a small room. This room serves as the studio of Henvalvani Community Radio in Chamba, Tehri Garhwal, Uttarakhand.
In 2001, Rajendra Singh Negi, along with other rural youths from the area, began Henvalvani with a mission to ?find a distinct voice of their own and their local community?. Inspired by stories of community radio acting as an agent for development in Nepal, Henvalvani initially narrowcast its programmes with members travelling from one village to another, urging people to listen to their programmes and join the discussions. This was at a time when the country didn’t even have a policy on community radio stations.
?Community knowledge sharing is what we look at. Larger social messages have other mass media like television, so our philosophy is to primarily focus on local issues, problems and interaction,? says Negi, who runs the station today with a team of 19, most of them volunteers. The station mostly broadcasts in the Garhwali language.
Funding and financial sustainability are key challenges for Negi, who manages with small advertisements right from local shopkeepers to vegetable vendors. Voice-overs, training programmes, street plays, etc, just provide enough to get by. ?We have costs of R20,000-30,000 a month and we’ve just been able to manage about R60,000 in advertising over the last six months or so.? Over the last decade, Henvalvani, a name derived from the valley where it is located, has forged a distinct bond with locals, evident from its listenership. Since March this year, around 17,000 messages have been recorded and the call-in show Sidhi Baat has received more than 7,000 calls. While Negi feels that the government should take up the issue of sustainability of far-flung areas like his, he is relieved by telecom minister Kapil Sibal?s assurance that the annual spectrum fee, which had gone up by five times a few months ago, will be scrapped altogether.
A household name
Run by 11 local women volunteers, Radio Ujjas in Kutch, Gujarat, reaches out to more than 20,000 listeners across 24 villages
RADIO UJJAS might have started its own station in June this year, but it was already a household name in the region. On air now from Bhimsar village near Nakhatrana in Kutch district, Gujarat, it was set up by the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS) in 1998.
The seeds, however, were sown in 1997 when KMVS conducted a local survey in which radio emerged as the preferred medium for women to gather information. Within a year, KMVS got Radio Ujjas on the floor. It bought airtime from All India Radio (AIR) and over the years, Radio Ujjas produced a number of programmes that were broadcast from AIR?s Rajkot station. With women at the centre of their programming, the dominant themes are education, handicrafts, panchayat, women?s rights, environment, natural resource management, etc.
Getting a licence, however, was no cakewalk. It took over three years to get clearance as Kutch is a border district adjacent to the India-Pakistan border. The land was donated by the village it?s based out of and the equipment grant came from UNESCO.
Reaching 24 villages and 20,000-plus listeners, the station broadcasts for three to four hours everyday. Currently run by 11 women volunteers from the local community, operation costs, for now, are generated through personal donations, some help from the local community and KMVS. It is also exploring advertising to meet operational costs in the future, which, according to those working on the project, would be a challenge.
A station for urban villages
Three years after it first went on air, financial stability remains a problem for Haryana?s Gurgaon Ki Awaaz
GURGAON KI Awaaz has been on air for a good three years in and around the ?millennium city? of Gurgaon. The challenges of an urban community radio, that too in the National Capital Region (NCR), are different from those operating in rural areas. There?s intense media clutter, airwaves are already clogged with popular radio stations, and even the target community?villagers and migrant labourers in this case?are exposed to mainstream media. The gaps too are different?urban poverty, inadequate power, education infrastructure, and lack of knowledge about opportunities in education, livelihood and income generation?and so on. With the objective of bridging these gaps, The Restoring Force (TRF, an NGO) applied for a community radio licence in 2007, and finally went on air two years later in November 2009. Gurgaon Ki Awaaz seeks to address the needs of the villages, semi-urban clusters and urban slums that fall within a 10-km radius around Gurgaon. The station has a footprint of approximately 15 km. ?We are functioning out of a single room that has been given to us by a couple of companies and are housed in the same building complex as a sort of a CSR exercise. We don?t have any trained personnel and our small team consists of people from the community. It?s all about giving the community an open forum to have a discourse about and within itself,? says station director Arti Jaiman.The station broadcasts for 22 hours a day, way beyond the average four to ten broadcasting hours for community radio stations in India. But even three years after it first went on air, financial sustainability is a challenge. The station relies on a mix of a few local and DAVP ads and project-based funding.?We?ve been running the station on a month-by-month basis,? she says. Focus areas include careers, entrepreneurship, health, women?s issues, self-help groups and music.
