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NEW
DELHI: Community Radio need not be a drab socially committed
affair, nor a financial burden, but can be as attractive in
content and a source of livelihood, as a discussion on the
Bombay University Community Radio at the E-India 2007 here
today showed.
Pankaj
Athawale, who is coordinating the University's programme,
said he has drawn up a revenue model based on the five minute
per hour advertising time allowed by the government for CRSs,
and says he has sold off all his advertising time.
"The
target audience is overlapping," he said, "which
means that at any time, two lakh students as well as others
living in the range of the signals are hooked on to the radio,
and from stationers to computer suppliers, tea stall owners
and dabbawallahs , everyone is our client because we have
priced it right."
Athawale
and Raman Nanda, a senior journalist who has set up some 30-odd
community radio stations (CRS) across Afghanistan, stressed
that the price fixed by government for a 10-second segment
is Rs 300, but they would offer it at Rs 100 and draw the
volumes.
Athawale
was speaking at the session on "Campus Community Radio"
during which he firmly argued that community radio is not
and should not be regarded as a public service broadcast system,
and should have its distinct identity in the face of competition
from the pubcaster as well as private FM channels.
"The
community radio suffers from an identity crisis from the time
of its birth," Athawale said, explaining that its role
is never clearly understood.
He
said that at the BU station, music and language training programmes
as well as those on computer sciences or AIDS or public information
campaigns on traffic rules or consumer protection would be
played.
"We
need to do it differently. We have to see what the private
channels are doing and stay away from drab monotonous programming,
as we will do AIDS awareness programme where two mythological
characters turn the topic into an audio drama, which makes
it appealing," he said.
In
the previous session this afternoon on "Low Cost Solutions
for CR", Hemant Babu, Technical Coordinator of Nomad
India Network, said it would be unfair and unsustainable to
expect volunteers to suffer in penury and there must be incentives.
Athawale
illustrated how that could be done.
He
and Nanda said that community radio can be made commercially
viable. Athawale said that there is something called 'social
business', and the idea is to make money and not profits,
on which the latter gave the example of Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.
He
said that CR should be have the identity not of entertainment,
nor public service, but meaningful radio, and if content can
be aggregated according to area of operation and packaged
smartly, it will have a large targeted and non-target specific
listenership that would attract revenue.
According
to an estimate at a rudimentary level, if a CRS operates 10
hours a day, and uses 50 minutes of its advertising time at
much less them allowable tariff, i.e., at Rs 100 per 10-second
slot, it could generate close to a million rupees a month,
enough to take care of the salaries of the staff and have
left-overs for running costs, or part of it.
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