Community radio, a platform for students to air views

Anna University started community radio (Anna CR) in 2004; the aim was to uplift the local community near the university by creating awareness on healthcare, education, sanitation etc. The content for Anna CR is mostly contributed by the people and for the people. 

The service covers a radius of 15km and airs programmes for 11 hours a day. Off-air programmes are also conducted in the community space, the focus being on AIDS awareness, medical camps, pollution control and other such issues.  

“Working for community radio has given me a lot of exposure. It gave me a chance to interact with the local community and I learnt a lot,” says Swetha Sankar, a final year student of Electronic Media in Anna University.  

MOP Vaishnav is another college that started community radio for the welfare of the people, as a part of which they adopted two schools. The programmes they create target education, hygiene, child abuse and women entrepreneurship. What began as two hours of on-air programming later expanded to 16 hours, coverinig a distance of 12 km around Nungambakkam. 

The college’s community radio initiative won a National Award under the thematic category for the programme, ‘Kudiyai Velvom’ in the sixth National Sammelan in Delhi.  “Fifty per cent of the programmes are done by students and the rest is contributed by members of the community who live near the college premises. We are planning to increase the participation of the community to a higher percentage,” says Dr S Anurekha, director of community radio, MOP Vaishnav College. 

Stepping into podcast: 

People tend to listen to a radio show that is well-researched and contains good content without the intrusion of advertisements or music. The podcast is one such platform that draws the attention of people from across the globe. A podcast is a form of digital media where the content is uploaded online. 

Madras University (MU) started uploading podcasts in November 2014. Students from Jaffna University, Sri Lanka visited Chennai to study the Indian media and to bridge a gap between the two regions. The Jaffna students provided content for the Madras University podcast. The online radio is named ‘TamizhyaazhInaiyaVanoli’ (Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka online radio). 

“We’re decades behind with respect to podcasting, it will take a minimum of five or six years for mainstream radio to start a podcast. So community radio might take longer, considering the technology we use. All these are different genres of radio: one should not be compared with another, but we’ll hope to enter into the podcast world at a much faster rate,” says RJ Gopida.