Experiences of deploying and commercializing a community radio automation system in India

Abstract

Community Radio (CR) stations are short range FM stations that seek to meet the needs of their listeners by involving them in content creation, feedback, and station management. In India, the community radio movement took off in 2008 when the first set of CR stations became operational. During that period we began design and development of the Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System (GRINS), an automation system designed to meet the ICT needs of CR stations. Over the last 2.5 years we have commercialized GRINS and deployed it at 19 CR stations in India and South Africa. In this paper, we present our experiences of software feature design, installation, training, technical support, and commercialization of GRINS in India.We demonstrate a number of aspects: Building a small feature set at first, and then adding features on-demand ensures that utility of the software is maintained and imposition of developers' assumptions is avoided. The common notion of keeping costs low for developing regions should not come at the sacrifice of stability of the solution. Standardization of deployments, even at the loss of flexibility for the customers, is important to keep the costs of technical support low. Through technical support data collected over one year, we show that physical moving parts are easy targets to introduce faults. Although identification of most faults can be done over the phone, remote Internet access is needed to resolve many faults. Finally, we highlight that selling to NGOs is hard; the best way is to club the sale as a part of a larger project for which the NGO is being funded. We believe these insights will be useful to guide others who want to commercially provide ICT solutions in developing regions.

Invited Paper: Ensuring Responsible Outcomes from Technology

“…Our choice to use IVR systems was driven by the rapid growth of mobile phone coverage, where even if people did not use the Internet due to challenges of affordability or digital literacy, they would still be able to use phones to make calls and press buttons to navigate content. Our conviction was also shaped with our prior experience of having built a community radio automation system with an inbuilt IVR feature that got used extensively [4,5]. Our reason to look beyond community radio to instead use mobile phones was the slow licensing process to get a community radio broadcast license in India, and the restriction by law of the broadcast being constrained to only 10-15km.…”

Building citizen engagement into the implementation of welfare schemes in rural India

“…It is structured as a question-answer forum where farmers can ask questions and respond to others' questions and answers. Other works such as GRINS [17], Gurgaon Idol [16] and Phone Peti [18] document the augmentation of Community Radio (CR) stations with interaction over IVR systems. Spoken Web [19,3] is yet another project that envisions VoiceSites (similar to websites) being created by poorly literate users through IVR interactions, and which can even be interlinked through VoiLinks (similar to hyperlinks) to browse across VoiceSites.…”

Gurgaon idol

“…At GKA this principle manifests in the form of receiving calls from listeners and putting their voices on air. The station uses a variety of methods to achieve this: It uses (a) GRINS [7,9], a radio automation system, to put calls live on air, (b) PhonePeti [10], an answering machine system, to receive feedback 24 hours a day, and (c) a dicta-phone to record received calls on their office phone. Across all these methods, the station receives more than 50 calls a day.…”