Gram Vaani has developed a new concept called co-casting, short for community casting or contextual casting or cooperative casting — a new paradigm for communication in rural areas which is centered around specific communities that share a common informational interest. Co-casting is different from community radio broadcasting in the way it defines a community. Communities are geographically defined in a radio broadcast, but co-casting communities are information specific. Our rationale for having co-casting communities is that a centralized radio station becomes unscalable to be able to deal with the information needs of multiple communities present around its geographical footprint. Second, it is impractical to expect the radio station staff to have expertise in different types of information, which is not the case with co-casting.

To illustrate with an example, a local co-casting community for health would include nurses and midwives in the village, doctors, and local women folk. To set the community moving, an NGO will be required to set up a GRINS box in the community they cater to, and community members can then call into the box and leave questions, or conference to interact with experts and other members. Educational videos made locally are also offloaded on to the box and can be played out to listener groups during scheduled sittings together with an expert or local mediator. These local mediators can be recruited from among more skilled community members who know the topic in detail.

But note that co-casting is not just technology. The people and process are more important. Co-casting advocates that experts and mediators should interact with their communities not only over phone or by sharing videos, but even in person, to be able to attach themselves more closely to the local context and help members internalize the information effectively.

 
We have put together a detailed manual about co-casting which describes the technology and processes in more detail.