Thaindian News

Ahmedabad, July 7 (IANS) The Self-Employed Women’s Association - a well-known NGO based here that works for women’s empowerment and encourages entrepreneurship - will soon start it own community radio. The station, which would be run by rural women in Sanand near here, would focus on developmental issues.
The community radio station called ‘Rudi No Radio’ (Rudi is radio in Gujarati) would be managed by SEWA Academy - an arm of SEWA - and would be based in Manipur village in Sanand, some 30 km from here. Sanand is now known for Tata Motors’s state-of-the-art manufacturing plant to roll out the world’s cheapest car Nano.

SEWA’s community radio station would be the 49th in the country and would be operational within the next three months from the rural training centre building of SEWA Academy at Manipur, said Namrata Bali, managing director of the academy.

She said the radio station would be managed entirely by rural women who have had no formal training in mass media. The programmes transmitted from the radio station would focus on developmental issues like agriculture, health and water conservation to name a few.

All the programmes would be produced by rural women in the local folk style, Bali added.

Prior to the community radio, SEWA has been running a ‘video cooperative’ - the first of its kind in the country that released 400 documentaries and 2,000 bits of footage on issues that concern marginalised and vulnerable people.

The SEWA’s ‘video cooperative’ team comprises women who were vegetable vendors, bidi makers, screen painters and tailors and now they manage the video unit completely on their own.

The ‘video cooperative’ received a special prize June 26 for its pathbreaking work from the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Association, Bali said.