Just a passing thought as I chew the back of my pencil (or the keyboard). In my online search for Haryanvi folk music (yes, I have unending faith in the power of Google to turn up anything and everything), I came across a video clip from Shubham Haryana TV. First off, I wasn’t even aware that there was such a channel. A quick browse showed me that I certainly did not get it among the plethora of regional channels that Tata Sky dished out.
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1 minute read | 181 words
Here’s a video link sent by Frederick Noronha through the CR-India mailing list. Sajan is the founder of the Community Radio Forum. Currently with Doordarshan, Sajan has 15 years of experience with radio. He has also been moderator and resource person for Solution Exchange, a UN ICT for Development initiative.
The video of Sajan outlining where community radio in India stands today: Can also be seen here.
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1 minute read | 67 words
The Telegraph has just run a story on the Birsa Agricultural College’s radio station that was launched in March 2008. Seems that the college is so enthusiastic about the response, they now want to set up 21 community radio stations across the 21 Krishi Vigyan Kendras in the state of Jharkhand.
The report quotes BAU director R.P. Singh Ratan who said, “The objective is to ensure that farmers in all these districts are constantly updated on agricultural procedures, the latest farming technologicies and even made aware of climate changes and pest attacks.
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1 minute read | 99 words
Great news just filtered in. According to a report at www.indiantelevision.com Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (Ignou) to broadcast DW-Radio over campus radio throughout India. DW will also assist IGNOU in training operators for community radio.
As part of the partnership, the Government of India-owned Gyan Vani FM will broadcast DW-Radio programming in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and English over campus radio at 29 associated universities.
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1 minute read | 115 words
We’re in a whirl of thinking, doing, worrying, talking, emailing. So far, it looks like that beyond our basic content components of Health (Talk to the Doc), Education (short “explainers” that elaborate on various concepts), language (English language learning), and Career Counselling (Focus on one career per program), we are also looking at modules in Legal Literacy (interesting and very relevant to our target audience), women and child rights (again we’re looking at Haryana with the worst child sex ratio in the country), and a through the day stream of entertainment.
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2 minute read | 349 words
A great example of community news broadcasts comes to us from a little village in Manipur, where some villagers have got together to do a daily morning broadcast of news culled from local newspapers. No radio, no license. They simply use a microphone, four loudspeakers and very crude PA system. Such is the broadcast’s popularity, that the villagers have taken to structuring their lives around the broadcast. Read more of this PANOS Relay feature here.
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1 minute read | 75 words
I eat my words. Okay not all of them. But at least the ones in the last blog where I cribbed about the WPC site. It turns out that the site has all the links – just that none of them show up when you access the site using Mozilla Firefox. Or for that matter if you’re using a version of Internet Explorer that is less than 5.5.
Since I am guilty of the first offence (I was forcibly evicted from my comfortable but limited IE existence and made to learn Firefox), no wonder nothing showed up.
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3 minute read | 433 words
Here we are, at the receiving end of a Letter of Intent from the Ministry of Communications informing us that they were considering the possibility of bestowing upon us a community radio license for Gurgaon. Cheers went around, and we then gleefully typed up the URL that we had been asked to visit to register online (http://www.wpc.dot.gov.in/). There was no offline option. A diktat had been passed - all applications had to be done online, followed by the printed version being sent off to the Ministry.
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3 minute read | 478 words
The NGO I work with (not for), The Restoring Force (TRF), has received the preliminary Letter of Intent from the Ministry informing TRF that it has been granted a license to start a community radio station in Gurgaon. Considering TRF’s existing work in government schools in Gurgaon, especially in the area of career counselling and infrastructure development, it seems appropriate to focus, at first, on this area alone.
Having taken on the demanding yet exciting challenge of getting the radio station off the ground for TRF, I’m dazzled by the possibilities of this medium.
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3 minute read | 578 words
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