Another piece of good news, we won the Juror’s Distinction Award in the 2009 Manthan Awards for technological innovation for development! Here’s a coverage from Mint. We kind of knew from insider sources that we are winning something, but what did come as a surprise was that we won the special distinction award. And what came as an even better surprise was that we got an actual trophy for it! Yay! The trophy has a pair of horns on it?! Zahir explained something about a bullock-card economy as the deeper meaning behind it, but my super-selective memory can’t recollect the details even 15 minutes later.
It’s been almost a year for Gram Vaani, and here’s a brief pictorial history in reverse chronological order.
Dec 2009: Zahir smiling at the camera instead of looking at the trophy
July 2009: Deployment visit to Orchha after our first release
Feb 2009: We have an office!
Jan 2009: It all started with Bala coding in his pyjamas at our official office at home
Jun 2008: And all the ideas actually started germinating way before the Knight award
And a special thanks to everybody who has been involved with us, in particular folks at the cr-india forum, Prof Keshav from Waterloo, Shoma and everybody from Development Alternatives who trusted us to do a pilot with them, FITT at IIT Delhi, and everybody from the Knight Foundation who made this possible. Thanks!
We are very pleased to announce the second release of GRINS, our Knight funded project of low-cost systems for community radio stations in rural areas. This builds upon the v0.1 release we did in June by primarily adding support for telephony, backup, and log-shipping, plus smoothing out many user interface issues and bugs. Having a single console to schedule broadcast, make and receive phone calls, archive live speech and manage content sets GRINS apart from any other commercial or open-source radio broadcast software available so far.
Telephony: The current support for live telephony allows the radio jockey to receive phone calls, converse with the caller, and optionally put them on air. Conferencing can also be set up across multiple callers if more than one phone line is available at the radio station. This means that the radio stations can do interesting applications, for example, have a doctor stay on line and invite community members to call and ask questions, or have agricultural experts and mediators stay on line and answer questions, etc. This also means that syndicated broadcast can be enabled across multiple GRINS stations by having them call each other! Here is a screenshot of what the telephony screen looks like.
Log shipping: Even if your radio station does not have Internet connectivity, you can still report back problems to us. All you need is a USB stick. As shown in the figure below, you then insert the key into any of the various machines you may be using. GRINS will copy its logs on to the key. Then walk over to an Internet cafe or any other Internet enabled PC and insert the key into this PC. Scripts will automatically fire off and upload the logs to our server. We can then take a look at these logs and figure out any problems in your setup.
To read more about GRINS v0.2, and for download/installation instructions, please take a look at our manual.
In our next release, we will provide the ability to send/receive SMS messages, and to share content across different CR stations.
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.
We are looking for software engineers and technical support staff to join our team, people well versed in computer networks, java, perl, python, and shell scripting. Please take a look at the detailed job descriptions and send us your CV:
We have put together a very brief manual about community radio. It is essentially meant for people and organizations who want to understand the concept better, and to explain the different things they need to do to run a community radio station.
The ETNow business channel is running a feature called “Starting Up” where they focus on startup companies and get feedback from different VCs. They covered Gram Vaani last week and took our pitch to Sanjeev Agarwal of Helion Ventures. Not too bad! Thanks Charitra and team for the fabulous effort!
Thanks to Shabana, we now have a short video that summarizes the vision and technology of Gram Vaani. We will shortly put out more videos from our pilots, and various video tutorials.
Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us. We released the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (or GRINS) in June, and setup GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand during our week-long visit in mid-July. This report describes (a) the operational setup at Radio Bundelkhand before GRINS was deployed, (b) the changes in the setup made by deployment of GRINS, (c) value added by GRINS to the setup, (d) challenges faced by us during the installation, and (e) future plans with the pilot setup. In brief, we describe below some important contributions made by GRINS. Please read the report for further details.
GRINS setup at Radio Bundelkhand
Playlist Management: GRINS now allows the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to not only prepare and save a playlist, but to also schedule a playlist for automatic transmission on air at a specified time in the future. As a result, there is no need for a person to be present near the computer to start the transmission. Other features like display of start time for each item in the playlist and the ability to preview items in the playlist while another item is playing on air have provided convenience to the staff.
Content Management: One of the primary concerns at Radio Bundelkhand was the need for a mechanism to manage content created by the station. GRINS enables content management by allowing users to save metadata regarding programs present in the system and to search for them at a later date.
Users can store a variety of information like language of the program, details of creators of the program, description of the program, trivia about the program, and so on. Different categories can also be assigned to programs based on its content. For example, a program regarding an interview with a doctor on polio vaccination could be assigned categories of “interview” and “health”. Once metadata information has been fed for programs, searching for them becomes extremely easy with our “facet” based search engine.
GRINS library search engine allows one to search for programs based on several independent aspects or “facets”. One could search for programs based on length of the program, categories assigned to the programs, trivia or description of the program, and so on, each of them reducing the search results independent of the other. Effectively the results thus obtained are a logical AND of all the constraints specified by the user. The ability of a user to search programs using constraints of so many types allows him/her to specify very powerful search queries. This is particularly useful when the content database grows very large. Once programs of desired kind have been searched for, GRINS allows users to obtain group statistics of the searched programs. These group statistics include total number of hours the searched programs have been on air, cumulative frequency of transmission of the searched programs, etc.
Diagnostics: One of our main concerns with deployment of GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand was the unavailability of a local expert with knowledge of GRINS. This is expected to be the case at most radio stations even for the future. This meant that in case of any kind of failure of the system, the station staff would be helpless. To avoid this kind of a scenario, GRINS includes a “Diagnostics Widget” that allows a user to diagnose the reachability of all “services” and connectivity of audio cables. A diagnostic test like this could be run by the station staff before a transmission to ensure that everything is in order. We believe this feature would significantly offset the unavailability of local manpower with knowledge of GRINS. The true value of this feature will become known as and when more deployments are done and the system is used for longer periods.
Robustness: In order to ensure that local staff could rely on GRINS, it was imperative that GRINS be robust in failure detection, resilience to network failures, and ensure recoverability with the least disruption. Significant effort was put in to ensure online detection of failure of many components of the system, resilience to temporary network failures, and recoverability in case a service encountered an unexpected error.
Anecdotally, as can be seen in the picture below, the “magic box” and the switch connecting the “magic box” with the computer running the user interface was placed near the feet of the staff during the first week when the system for being deployed and tested! Given the situation it was quite conceivable that a slight kick to the network cables could cause temporary loss of connectivity.
Network hub and GRINS under the table, installed dangerously close to feet
Transmission Logging: GRINS logs programs that are played out on air. The staff therefore need not maintain a large archive of all audio that is played out on air. A “Log View Widget” allows them to simply look at all the programs played out between any two dates. This ensures that Government regulations can be met with the least effort.
We will keep working very closely with the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to ensure that there are no technical problems faced by the station. Our next visit to the station will happen very soon when we will deliver several minor features requested by the station staff. We will also collect logs of operation of GRINS at the station for further analysis.
Our next major upgrade will add telephony capabilities to GRINS. With these capabilities, the staff at Radio Bundelkhand will be able to accept phone calls and record conversations. Currently Radio Bundelkhand accepts song requests for only one hour during the day, where a staff member receives the call manually and records the conversation on a recorder by keeping the call on a speaker phone. With telephony capabilities, the station will be able to accept song requests throughout the day in an automated manner without the staff having to manually receive calls and talk to the caller.
We also intend to collect logs from the radio station periodically over the next one year to study if the system experiences any performance or robustness issues. In the long run, this would provide us with information regarding stability of the system.
Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development Alternatives, one of the largest NGOs in India. This pilot has been an excellent experience for us. We saw the folks at the radio station produce Bundeli Idol, a strong competitor to the American and Indian Idol (!!), and a program on the recent solar eclipse, and got lots of feedback about our system. Bala and Zahir spent a week there setting up GRINS, our platform for community radio stations, and training the radio station staff and volunteers to use the system.
Up and running in a day!
Myself and Zahir reached Orchha on the 13th morning. We had a short meeting with Ms Anujaa (Station Manager - who handles bulk of the administrative work and also finds time to guide the reporters in their content creation), Mr Ashok Shukla (he is the top technical guy here and a jack of all trades!), and Mr Amit (who works closely with the reporters on content production). We took a few hours to setup our box, and figure out the cabling in such a way that the computer used for running the front end of our system could also be used for their usual production work. It seems they do have access to audio and computer related equipments of decent quality, through the city of Jhansi (Jhansi is about 16kms from Orchha). We could get some of the reporters to work on the system from time to time. We used the feedback from them to fix some usability bugs and improve the general stability of the system. These activities of testing, feedback and updating the system went on in parallel for the better part of the week we spent there.
Zahir fixing up some cables
Bala giving a tutorial on GRINS
The young reporters
One has to experience the infectious enthusiam and high motivation levels of these young reporters in person. They are mostly in the late teens to early twenties age group. They are a friendly, confident and talented bunch of people. Belonging to the villages near Orchha, they are able to connect with the local population and draw them out. Writing scripts for their own programmes is well within their comfort zone, and so is working on the computer to create audio content. They are quite proficient in using Audacity for their editing needs, and before GRINS was installed, relied on winamp for playing out their content on-air. The old system will be used as a backup for a few weeks before they come to rely solely on GRINS. Even though they are interested and motivated to learn new things, they face some barriers in knowledge acquisition. On the production side, their toolset is mostly limited to Audacity and some audio format convertion tools and the like. Content management is a tough nut with files stored in difficult to navigate folders. GRINS should be able to help them with this bit. I suspect that even a short training session on the variety of production tools available should do them great help. They have the inquisitiveness to explore things and follow things up on their own. So far, the training they have received has been on field work. They were unfamiliar with the concepts behind audio mixers and were not confident in their knowledge of the connections and configurations of their existing setup.
Content production
They do not have adequate access to quality content which they could use as raw materials for their content production. The nearest public library is in Jhansi (about 16 kms away), which, apparently serves mostly old content. They have access to an unreliable internet connection, but even when connectivity is available, they are unable to make effective use of it since most of them are not conversant in English. I think we should try to make quality content available in local languages. Lack of access to experts in fields like basic sciences is yet another reason why they are unable to produce radio content related to such fields. They were quite taken in by the 3D interactive globe on my KDE desktop. They found kstars quite interesting too. I believe we could make localized versions of similar educational software available to these students. I suspect software like Celestia, Kgeography, and Parley will turn out to be immensely popular! Next time Gram Vaani visits Radio Bundelkhand, we will be carrying some of these software with us.
Creating a program on the solar eclipse
We got a chance to watch them make a programme on the solar eclipse (July 22). They aimed to counter prevalent superstitions on the subject. Through discussions and reading articles from magazines, they quickly built up their own knowledge and promptly recorded a fifteen minute programme. We chimed in with our knowledge of Earth, Universe and Everything. (And yes Nishi, you were right, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the sun, while Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system. My bad.). She was pretty comfortable with her astronomy, since she had a chance to brush up on it when she prepared for the Railways Examination. All this happened under the watchful eyes of Shuklaji, who gave them a few suggestions on how to structure the show. His ability to contribute to things both technical and non-technical is invaluable to this station.
Bundeli Idol and advertisements
Radio Bundelkhand regularly broadcasts programmes on agriculture, folk songs, career opportunities, heritage and life of women. Recently, they have started airing advertisements too. The reporters themselves put in effort to bring in these ads which could potentially be a good source of revenue. Broadcast of an advertisement of a particular horticultural nursery seemed to get the attention of nearby local businesses and more of them have expressed their desire to broadcast their own ads. Amit had come up with an idea to have a Bundeli Idol contest which has generated a lot of interest from the public. We attended one of the audition sessions in the village of Niwari, about 30kms from Orchha. They had about 35 participants coming in that day, and fifteen more on the following day. The make-shift studio was an office belonging to Taragram. RB had taken a few instruments with them which the participants could use. They are required to sing Bundeli (local dialect) songs for the contest. Those who are selected in this round would be called up and invited for a recording session at the station. They have worked out the format of the competition and arranged for judges. The daily transmission time was to be extended by half an hour to accomodate this programme. This programme would give a boost to their collection of Bundeli songs.
Bundeli Idol recording in progress
What’s next
We will visit Orchha pretty soon. During our next visit, we will add some minor features that were requested by our friends here. We will also make arrangements for getting the application logs that are created here back to Delhi. In another two to three months we should be here again with our brand new telephony related widgets. It should help them with running contests like Bundeli Idol, where the viewers can vote via SMS or through the telephone. Telephony service would also help them in disseminating basic information like programme schedules, without engaging the time of any of their staff members.
Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use. Newer technologies for wireless broadband such as WiMax do promise higher bandwidth, but infrastructure costs for deployment in rural areas remain high. How then can Internet connectivity be provided in such areas in a robust and low-cost manner?
One could, of course, ask whether the Internet is required at all in rural areas, given that most of the population is only semi-literate. But this is a flawed argument. The Internet today goes beyond text and includes video, audio, images, and even caters to local vernacular languages. This makes a lot of content relevant to a much larger demographic. Second, the Internet has also become the primary vehicle for delivery of transaction-oriented applications such as buying a train or bus ticket, or making bill payments, and hence is more relevant to rural areas for making it easier to conduct such transactions.
A number of research groups have developed different technologies to provide connectivity in remote rural areas, and I will talk about some of them in subsequent posts. In this post, I will describe an innovative project called VLink done by the Tetherless Computing Group at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The group, led by Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, has been working in this area for the last four years. There were two main principles behind much of the philosophy followed by the group:
Delay reduces cost: When we normally think about the Internet, we think of it as an always-connected medium where users can surf the web, browse pictures, view videos, etc, all on an instantaneous basis. But this is not always necessary for many applications. For example, if you want to send an email, it is immaterial whether the email gets delivered to the recipient’s mailbox instantaneously or a couple of hours later, because the recipient will only see the email the next time that they log onto their computer. Similarly, if you want to buy a train ticket, it should be sufficient if you were to put in a request right now and receive the ticket the next day when you log on. The drift here is that for many applications, technically called delay-tolerant applications, you need not always be connected to the Internet, and even delayed connectivity is fine to a large extent. The insight of this project is that if users are willing to tolerate some delay, it can significantly reduce the cost of providing Internet access, as I will soon describe.
Applications and communication medium are separate from each other: Consider various examples of applications such as email, ticket booking, video download, picture download, etc. None of these applications really depend on whether the underlying medium of communication is a satellite link, or a broadband link, or maybe even a dial-up link. And the Internet has been designed in such a manner that different communication technologies can be substituted for each other, but the applications will still work. In technical language we call this layering, meaning that applications work at a higher layer than the communication medium, and as long as the roles and responsibilities of layers are cleanly separated from each other, higher layers won’t care about how the lower layers are implemented.
VLink used these two principles to develop a software framework on which delay tolerant applications could be built, and different communication channels could be used in the underlying layers for moving bits to and from the Internet. These communication channels include the following:
Vehicles to ferry data: Vehicles such as cars and buses that regularly travel between villages and cities are fitted with a wireless router that runs from the vehicle’s battery. This router carries a hard disk and supports WiFi. When the vehicle drives past a kiosk in a village, it wirelessly picks up data from the computers in the kiosk, stores this data on the hard disk, and pushes the data off into the Internet when the vehicle drives through a WiFi hotspot that is connected to the Internet. The same process is used to fetch data from the Internet and deliver it to the kiosk. Even if the vehicle does not stop as it passes a kiosk, the 5-6 seconds of connectivity are sufficient to transfer almost 200MB of data. The system supports all sorts of additional features such as retransmission of data if a vehicle breaks down midway, duplication of data on multiple vehicles to increase the chances of speedy delivery, fragmentation of data so that different parts of the data can be transferred through different vehicles, etc.
USB keys: Probably the most robust method of data transfer, USB keys are cheap, can provide gigabytes of storage, and can be carried around virtually anywhere humans can go. VLink uses USB keys as a communication medium, and, similar to vehicles carrying data, the data can be split across multiple USB keys, duplicated, retransmitted, and reassembly works regardless of the order in which different data fragments arrive at the destination. In fact, some fragments could be brought in over USB keys while others over vehicles, and everything will still work!
SMS: Although a very non-intuitive mechanism, it actually makes a lot of sense. VLink can fragment data into 160-byte chunks that can be text-messaged to the destination and then reassembled. This is especially useful for data that needs to be delivered urgently, for example, a high priority email, which cannot wait for somebody to carry a USB key or for a vehicle to drive past. VLink can internally infer that such short high priority messages can be sent over SMS, while larger non-urgent messages can be sent over a USB key.
Robust and Low Cost
Such non-conventional communication mechanisms actually end up being very robust and low-cost. The cost of wireless routers on vehicles gets amortized across all kiosks that a vehicle visits. Similarly, USB keys are cheap and a key can be handed to practically every single person who moves between a village and city. SMS is also available practically everywhere, and in fact many countries such as India have bulk SMS plans to allow the user to send many SMS messages in one single go.
The VLink group has also built some useful applications on this platform. A Flickr application fetches pictures matching a search term, a YouTube application similarly searches and downloads video, an email application delivers email, etc. An open API is also provided, which allows developers to build other innovative delay tolerant applications as well.
Different parts of the VLink system have even been piloted in many locations. A vehicle-based pilot was done in the village of Anandpuram near the city of Vishakapatnam in India, where VLink was used to move e-governance forms for birth certificates, income certificates, and more to the Internet.
A pilot in Ghana helped connect a central hospital in Accra with rural clinics, enabling nurses in remote locations to consult with doctors in the city. And even at Gram Vaani, we plan to use USB keys to ship logs from remote community radio stations to the Internet so that we can analyze them to find bugs, before sending back upgrades and patches to be automatically applied to the systems running at different radio stations.
For more information, you can either write to me because I worked on many parts of the project for my thesis, or you can write to Prof. Keshav, or leave a comment here and we will get back to you.
