| NEW
DELHI: The key issue of keeping community radio sustainable found some answers
in the presentation here today by All India Radio senior engineer Ashish Bhatnagar,
who insisted that a low power transmitter made it easier costwise.
In any case,
if a sense of community has to be the backbone of the CR movement, it did not
make sense to have a very wide area of coverage, he stressed. Bhatnagar,
who was speaking at the E-India 2007 on the issue of "Infrastructure and
Technology Considerations", said it is better to have the CRS (community
radio station) in the village, rather than address the village from outside, especially
from a city. In
any case, he explained that in the case of high power transmitters, there is frequency
loss due to the repeatability factor. Though
Bhatnagar, who is also a CRS activist, discussed the entire process of getting
a licence and operating a CRS, but his main focus was on sustainability from the
word go. "ERP
(Effective Radiated Power) is different from power of a transmitter," he
explained, and added that cable loss could be made up by antenna gain.
He said, "The
main issue is the site for location of the tower, because coverage is governed
primarily by effective antenna height, and with proper site selection, the difference
could be up to 6 DB, which is a four-times increase, so why do we need a high
power transmitter?" He
also said that in case of FM radio, which is what CR runs on, the power of the
transmitter does not matter much, and it is effective height of the transmitter
that matters most. In
terms of costs, Bhatnagar – who has done extensive work on CRS in Chhattisgarh
- advised interested persons to check out the site, the terrain profile, power
supply, man made and ambient noise, possibility of damage due to lightning and
water exposure and said that it is a must to have proper very low resistance wiring
for lightning conductors. Bhatnagar
also spoke against stereophonic transmission, as communities for which CR is aimed
have no stereo receptors, so it does not make sense to have stereophonic transmission.
Hemant Babu's
(NOMAD India Network) statement on using low cost touch screen technology to replace
computers was also taken up by Bhatnagar, who said this too could reduce costs.
The issue of
sustainability also found voice in the presentation made by Ashish Sen of Voices
who spoke in the second session on E-governance. Sen
mentioned the example of the Karnataka based CRS "Namma Dhwani" (Our
Voices), which also conducts computer training, web browsing facilities for which
the users pay, offline browsing of data downloaded in some nearby city, etc, and
also makes many radio programmes and video coverage, which gives them enough money
to sustain the centre. Sen
said that in the past two years, Namma Dhwani has sustained itself financially
without any need of outside help, and in any case, due to the voluntary nature
of operations, the costs are low. | 
