Why radio sets are in much demand every Sunday in some of southern Indias villages
Geeta Sharma
OneWorld South Asia, New Delhi.
The medicinal qualities of innocuous herbs, simple and effective home remedies for persistent diseases, handy tips on time-tested farming techniques. These and many more snippets of indigenous knowledge are being generated and beamed on the AIR waves of picturesque Pondicherry in southern India.
But isnt that what most broadcasts on All India Radio (AIR) seek to do inform and educate while they entertain? What makes these programmes different and special is their local content and flavour, right from language, content and relevance to demand.
Sunday surprise!
The 15-minute broadcasts in Tamil go on air at 0700 HRS every Sunday to provide the target audience farmers, women, children and others in the villages information that is relevant to their daily lives and livelihoods. The first of this series of programmes was aired on May 9, 2004 and around 10 such programmes have been broadcast till now. Initially, the programmes were aired every fortnight.
So be it details about low-cost technology solutions for farmers, health messages on preventing diseases or recipes on turning commonplace vegetables into delectable delights or native treatment methods through herbal medicines, these programmes have it all.
The content of these capsules, currently being prepared by volunteers of the OKN programme, reaches out to nearly 0.1 million people in a radius of 200 km in this union territory and part of Tamil Nadu.
OKN gets a boost
These broadcasts are translating into reality a key objective of the Open Knowledge Network (www.openknowledge.net) project that seeks to collect, share and disseminate local knowledge, using flexible and low-cost technical solutions.
Being implemented in the region by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and OneWorld South Asia (OWSA), the OKN is providing people at the grassroots opportunities to communicate locally relevant knowledge in local languages.
Unlike most programmes that are top-bottom in their approach and beam down information to communities based on assumed needs, the strength of these broadcasts is their local relevance.
Local knowledge from local people
More significantly, volunteers, from the community itself are being trained on producing the content, points out Dr Thiagarajan Ramasamy of MSSRF. Very soon, the community itself will become the provider of information and information gatherers to produce the programmes.
He hopes that this model of local ownership would attract more users and motivate other institutions to produce such programmes for community development.
Dr Thiagarajan says content for the upcoming programmes will reflect MSSRFs community development concepts, such as WEHABE water, energy, health, agriculture, biodiversity and environment.
Peoples feedback and involvement in generating content will provide the benchmarks for success of these programmes, he adds.
For information/comments on OKN radio broadcasts, contact: Dr A R Thiagarajan, Content Manager, Open Knowledge Network, at rthiagarajane@hotmail.com
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