Sanand gets community radio station

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (Sewa), a city based non-governmental organisation that works for women’s empowerment, has started its community radio station (CRS) at Sanand, the site made famous by Tata Motors’ Nano plant and around 35 km from Ahmedabad.

Called ‘Rudi no Radio’, the country’s 49th CRS became operational on Thursday in Manipur village.

The radio station would be managed entirely by rural women who have had no formal training in mass media. The programmes would focus on developmental issues, like agriculture, health and water conservation, and produced by rural women in the local folk style, said Namrata Bali, managing director of Sewa Academy.

“Sewa has noted that many of its members listen to radio avidly while they work be it bidi-making, incense-stick making, stitching or weaving,” she said.

According to the NGO, besides reaching to a wider mass, producing community radio programme is simpler and inexpensive. "To reach out to hundreds of thousands of members within a rural community there is no other more effective way that a radio," Bali said.

Sewa started its first community radio programme in April 2005, a weekly 15-minute programme produced and broadcast by its members. It extends to the Ahmedabad-Vadodara area on All India Radio-Ahmedabad airwaves and is estimated to have a listener base of 500,000.