“Three guys in a little room full of computers, networks cable and every kind of hardware. Welcome in the Gram Vaani start up office located in the business incubation area of the Indian Institute of Technology – New Delhi ! These guys know they could make a big difference with what they are building but they stay very humble. Gram Vaani is focus on allowing local rural communities to create content. This could help empower these communities with the exchange of ideas, opinion etc. The first step they are making is a low cost radio station that would allow every wanna be radio animator, to use the mobile phones of the listeners to create content . Well, see the video, visit their website and spread to the world ! This is a real “pepite” as we would say in french. Thanks guys for receiving us ! We wish you all the best !”

Thanks a lot for the kind words MakeSense! The video is even cooler! You’ll get an idea of the inside of our office from the video:

Agriculture and women

Agriculture can be looked upon from many perspectives. Food as a commodity, where farmers are considered merely as factory workers and we talk about increasing their productivity though machines, technology, etc. Agriculture as an economic activity with linkages into the global market, so that it becomes important to streamline supply chains, improve irrigation, and prevent price fluctuations. From an ecological perspective, in terms of organic farming, local supply chains, and keeping a small footprint. Or it can be looked upon from a cultural and humanist perspective by putting a face to the farmer, and this face is often that of a woman. As you read on, try to keep this context in mind by linking back the people in agriculture with the bigger landscape of the economic and ecological settings in which all of us are living.

It is well known that women in India and elsewhere have always played a huge role in post-harvest processing of food grains. What is probably less well known about India is that because of poorer economic rates of return in agriculture, men are moving into the cities for various unskilled jobs leaving their wives to manage the farms. At times many villages are only left with women, kids, and old people, while the men have gone off to work in factories in the cities or to pull a rickshaw. This is even more common during the off-season of farming because the lack of proper irrigation prevents any farming from happening at all during those few months. So you can see how policies for proper irrigation, increasing incomes in agriculture, market linkages, and other economic and political factors can influence the culture of farming communities.

A second arena where women again come into prominence in agriculture is because of development activities. Microfinance institutions and various not-for-profit organizations often like to work more closely with the women than with men. And in Satara near Pune, over 3500 loans have been taken by women to buy mobile phone based remote starters for tube wells and water pumps in their farms! Similarly, when a community radio station was set up in the area, one of the first advertisements go out on air was from a woman calling others to aggregate their little amounts of farm produce, and now they have rented a truck which goes back and forth each week to the city markets!

A third example came from Karnataka, where a not-for-profit organization helped set up a network of retail and produce collection points, again run by women. And here the women requested their local self-help-group organization to train them on selling mobile SIM cards through the same retail points! Cellphones, as many would know, are gaining tremendous outreach in rural areas. Companies therefore need a distribution network in rural areas to sell value added services, prepaid recharges, and such. And women are again the preferred ones to do it, what could be better than to leverage the existing agriculture distribution networks which are already in place.

Agriculture and productivity

If we think about agriculture as a food producing activity, many issues arise related to operational scale and efficiency. There is a question of proper education and training in disease control for example. Over 98% of a potato crop under contract with PepsiCo was once completely wiped out because of blight. And here we are talking about small farmers for whom one crop can make a difference between sustainance and falling into deep poverty. PepsiCo has since engaged a large army of extension workers who make sure that farmers know about the correct methods to control pests and crop diseases, and also provide weather insurance to their contract farmers. Similarly, the correctness of methods is very important. Paddy seeds can either be sown in a flooded field, or first sown and then flooded with water. It turns out that in the former approach over half the water is lost in puddling. There is no new technology here, no new seeds, only a different method of cultivation. And if we add that over 80% of water in India is consumed for agriculture, you can imagine the impact that good methods can have here! There are many similar examples where using the right methods can alone improve productivity, and these have even been tested in small pilots here and there, but very few practices have managed to make their way to farmers in a big way.

GM seeds are seen as another method to increase agricultural productivity. I will not go into the details of this hotly contested topic, and assuming that biotechnology is the way to go to grow more food for more people, the one problematic issue is the tradeoff between price and innovation. Companies such as Monsanto are innovating and developing new seed lines — pest resistant, drought resistant — and want to earn back the investments they have made. Exercising IP rights by putting in a stopper gene for re-planting seeds is one way, higher prices is another way, but effectively these methods do increase costs for the farmers at least in the short term. Can new methods be developed for companies to capitalize on their investments made for innovation, instead of simply a higher price? Governments can provide subsidies, for one. Alternately, the government of India chose to instead invent their own seed lines which could be sold at lower prices. To add a footnote here, the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow actually successfully did this for cotton seeds. But these genes have not seen the light of day as yet because government run institutes are completely lost in getting regulatory approval and passing food safety tests!

Society and agriculture

But productivity should not be the only goal. It is inextricably linked with society and ecology. Here is an example. Contract farming normally comes with strict regulations about crop rotation patterns, seed varieties, etc. But this has often resulted in farmers losing touch with their lands and passing the age-old wisdom to their next generation. In Uttaranchal, there is a concept of 12 anaja (seeds) which are supposed to be sown in rotation to preserve the soil health and the water table. The water table by the way is in most rapid decline in the Gangetic plains of north India than anywhere else in the world. Highly optimized contract farming however often neglects these principles because even if the soil deteriorates in one part, companies can always relocate their operations to other areas. The losers are actually the communities in these areas because they are losing the wealth of their lands, and likely at a price which does not take the soil and water table decline into account, and to make matters worse, they are losing agricultural wisdom over the generations.

Another interesting example, again from the hills of Uttaranchal, was the destruction of local supply chains because of increasing capitalization of agriculture. A village on one side of a hill could be producing rice while the other side could be barren. However, rather than sustain local supply chains, pricing and infrastructure are rigged in such a way that food first travels all the way to Delhi and then back. Not only is this ecologically nonsensical, but it also damages the cultural fabric that may have united the two villages together in the past.

Us

Those were quite some eye-opening issues for me, and underscored the importance of seeing agriculture in a more holistic setting. Economics, policies, technology, ecology, and culture all come together. To drive the point deeper, I coincidentally happened to watch Avatar the same evening, and realized the important link we have with nature. We cannot think in terms of us and nature, it is all one, we are a part of nature, and so are the technologies we develop and the policies we follow to live.

Can Gram Vaani help here? I definitely think so, because we are building a vehicle to spread this message and help everybody realize how rural areas are fundamentally interconnected to our lives, something that the mainstream media completely neglects. Stay tuned in for a formal announcement about the release of our GRINS box for community radio stations. We are almost there, I personally cannot wait for this having waited for it since almost three years now! We are also in conversation with Video Volunteers, a fellow Knight awardee, of how we can extend our radio based setup to video as well, and together build what we call a YouTube for the Next Billions.

Credits: All these examples and insights come from the panelists and attendees of the Ashoka conference. In particular, Kalyani Menon-Sen, Anita Paul (Community Initiatives), Chetna Gala Sinha (Mann Deshi), Uma Swaminathan (RUDI-SEWA), Prema Gopalan (Swayam Shiksha Prayog), Bharat Ramaswamy (ISI), and Vivek Bharati (PepsiCo).

To me and so many more, India hardly seems to be heading along the superpower direction it wants to, rather it’s a country in crisis. Every single infrastructural system seems to collapsing. Yet we are proudly happy about the GDP growth again heading towards the 9% region while the rest of world remained mired in a recession. How much of this 9% growth has actually translated into improving education, having more doctors, better healthcare, smoother systems in government offices? Don’t get me started on what this 9% growth is actually helping to fund, that’s another story! But the point here is that one of the jobs of the media is supposed to be to bring attention to the important issues at hand. The Indian media however has been a huge failure too. It is so depressing to hear the trivial arguments that most of our journalists make these days that for good reason I decided to not buy a TV and get all my news online from sources that I somewhat respect. Media and governance are however inextricably linked. The feedback loop is essential to ensure effective governance. This is the vision and mission of Gram Vaani, to equip the people themselves to put together the better media, a more sensible media, that closes the feedback loop and actually talks about important things which matter and help fix governance.

Given Gram Vaani’s focus on community media, I kept my talk around two challenges for scaling community media: technology and training. Technology, as in, appropriate technical tools designed keeping the rural context in mind, much like what we have done in our design for GRINS. And training, as in, the need for training the community radio staff and volunteers to make relevant programs by giving them assistance on ideas and awareness for new radio programs.

My talk led into discussions around the use of IT for education, which is especially relevant in the Indian context where we urgently need to broaden the educational base to the bottom of the pyramid. The German President remarked that he was very curious to know what efforts the Indian government and institutions like IIT are taking to do this, for example, by building new technological tools such as GRINS to take information and awareness to the bottom of the pyramid. He expressed his concerns that poverty reduction in India leaves much to be done, and many people actually argue that endemic poverty in India has in fact increased over the years than decreased.

The response from the Minister and a few others present was, speaking very honestly, somewhat cliche and therefore lacking in conviction. The Minister for example talked about the rural employment guarantee scheme, and the various funds that the government sets aside for technology development for rural areas. Somebody also mentioned statistics about the rural income growth being more than the urban income growth, and the need for persistent GDP growth rates to eradicate poverty. But all these arguments seemed to have singularly missed the point, which is that the same strategies have been followed since the last so many decades but have not brought about any radical changes. In fact, what I see in front my eyes is only increasing disparity. The GDP-measured economic growth is not reaching the poor, it is only a horizontal circulation of money that is happening at the top of the pyramid, and actually at the cost of the poor by taking away their lands to make way for factories, and paying them paltry sums of money for working in these factories (in the name of increasing employment) while the factory owners make tons of more money. Nobody talked about any evaluations behind this dismal trend, and how can it be rectified. It is all somewhat disappointing certainly. I think the Indian political system and bureaucratic system, all need visionaries at the helm to lead the country and that’s where lies the primary weakness.

Manthan award and scalability

We actually won in a special category, getting the Juror’s Distinction Award, which makes us even better than the best! The award was for GRINS (Gramin Radio Inter Networking System), the community radio broadcast system we have developed. There is no equivalent open-source or even commercial radio automation system which supports the extensive features that we do.

This is a very timely award for us. Manthan is focused on community media in South Asia in a big way. There were many organizations from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Thailand that attended the awards and conference. It has helped put us in touch with all these groups from around the world, and they are all very keen to use our system and publicize it in their networks.

We are evolving an interesting model to help us scale our outreach. In terms of installation, we have kept our system absolutely plug-n-play so that we just have to ship out a GRINS box and radio stations can be up and running after hooking on the right cables and transmitter. But the challenge lies in how rapidly can we churn out boxes given our limited resources, and how can we provide support and maintenance around the world. So, what we plan is to identify resellers in different countries. Resellers may include small companies or individuals that do IT installations in offices. Such resellers will have the technical knowhow to install GRINS like systems, and also have a clear commercial incentive to convince radio stations to use our technology. At the same time, we will also make efforts to tie up with non-profits in different countries and do pilot projects with them to convince more organizations about the validity of our techniques.

Second release

The second release was a huge increment. We now support telephony, so that the radio station operator can make and receive phone calls through the GRINS user interface. This simplifies the task so much for them, because otherwise they would have to change mixer settings to archive conversations, or do something different to put the callers on air. Commercial radio stations also find this very despite more expensive equipment that they use, and most stations only play out pre-recorded phone conversations. The GRINS telephony interface looks as follows:

The radio station operator can specify whether they want to start accepting phone calls. Then, when a call comes, the operator can accept it and talk to the caller, and optionally even put the person on air. If multiple phone lines are available at the station, then a conferencing can even be set up among multiple callers. So, for example, a doctor can be asked to stay online over phone, and women or children from the villages can be invited to call and discuss their problems with the doctor. The entire conversation can be archived or played out instantaneously.

We are now working on what we call offline voice applications. Here, people can call and record questions or comments, and others can give answers to these questions. All the various audio snippets will get archived, and can be later played out on air. So, we can have voice applications for agricultural consultancy where farmers can call and ask questions, or for capacity building of healthcare workers where nurses and mid-wives working in villages can share knowledge with each other.

Here are a few interesting photos from our last trip to Orchha, our pilot location. The radio station has a wireless phone service, and we see here our man sitting in the sun on a grassy patch waiting for a call! The same phone actually also plugs into GRINS when the radio station wants to open itself to accept phone calls.

And this below is the coolest radio/transistor set I have ever seen! It can tune into FM and AM broadcasts, play out cassette tapes and mp3 from a USB stick, and even has a remote! Unbelievable! Somebody has retrofitted components from all sorts of junk and made this, talk about ingenuity!

Here are so many people from the radio station, reading the morning newspaper. Disconnected from the city and not having a television set in office, this is the only source of daily news for the people, which they use to make interesting radio programs.

More pilots

Our plan is to set up two more pilots of GRINS. One will be in the beautiful mountain city of Dharamshala, the Dalai Lama’s residence, where the Tibetan’s Children Village is running the radio station. The other pilot will be close to Delhi, in the suburbs of Gurgaon near an automobile factory. Both pilots present a very different demographic from Orchha. The Dharamshala radio station is actually run by kids! They sing poems, make educational programs for themselves and their families, and have singing competitions. The Gurgaon radio station on the other hand is an urban community radio station meant for the factory township, for workers and their families. Our first pilot at Orchha is so much different, here the radio serves about thirty remote villages with people working primarily around agriculture. We hope to have quite a few interesting stories to report very soon!

We are also getting requests for a lot of community radio stations in India to use the GRINS box. So, we will start making shipments of the box in about a month, and expect to have the box installed in more than twenty radio stations in 2010 itself.

Community radio and co-casting

I had earlier written about many challenges that the community radio movement in India was facing. Much needs to be done to pick up pace, but licenses are being given out steadily and now there are almost fifty community radio stations. Not all of them are entirely community-centric, many of them actually being campus radio stations run by educational institutions, but even these stations do serve a community of students afterall! We keep getting inquiries from a lot of places on how to set up a radio station, and so we put together a brief manual, a 101 on community radio, to outline the different things that an organization needs to do before it can set up a radio station.

All along while we were developing our system, we also realized that the system is more widely applicable than just for radio stations. So we developed a new concept, which we call co-casting! It is 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.

The next steps

With so much going on, we need to be very clear on what we want to prioritize next! Our agenda for the next couple of months is going to be around increasing our footprint. We are productizing the GRINS box, so that any community radio station or co-casting adventurer can just buy the box from us, or buy the hardware and install our software on it, plug it in and get started. At the same time, we will start looking out for resellers in different countries who can spawn off an installation activity at their end. All our software is open-source, so the resellers just have to find clients, buy the hardware, and download and install our software. At the same time, we are also looking at how to help make the community radio stations financially sustainable. Our current thinking is around tying up with content providers in education, consultancy, advertisements, etc and use the radio stations as a rural outreach arm for these content providers. The revenue will get passed on to the radio stations and help them cover their operating costs of staff salaries, utility bills, etc.

Stay tuned!

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!

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.

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.

http://gramvaani.org/get-involved/job-openings/