Patna, May 12: Villagers of Samastipur and Patna districts would soon have their first brush with community radio. For, two community radio stations would go on-air in these two districts from May 17.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar would inaugurate these radio stations in a special function to be organised on the aforesaid date at Patna.

While one such radio station would come up at Barauli Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Samastipur district, another one would come up at KVK Barh in Patna district.

Meant to serve as channels for disseminating useful information in farming community, rural women and children, the radio stations would emit signals in 20km radius.

To begin with, these stations would broadcast programmes for two hours every day. While the broadcasting time in the morning would start from 7 in the morning and would continue till 8am, another one hour of programme would be aired in the evening and broadcast in this slot would commence from 6pm.

Thirty minutes of both morning and evening slots would have agriculture-related programmes, while the remaining 30 minutes would be divided for programmes meant for women and students as well as those looking for some entertainment. Weather-related information would also be broadcast on a regular basis as these are of vital interest to the farming community.

And to ensure that the villagers get a local touch in the programmes being aired by these radio stations, efforts would be made to generate content in local language of the area concerned so that listeners could easily understand the programmes. Similarly, the entertainment section of the broadcast would provide opportunity to local male and female artistes to present their programmes in this slot.

Fund for running these community radio stations is being provided by the respective Agriculture Technology Management Agency (Atma) of the district concerned.

“To begin with, a fund of Rs 54 lakh has been provided to meet the running cost of one radio station for three years,” Bihar agriculture management and extension training institute (Bameti) director R.K. Sohane told The Telegraph. Bameti coordinates the functioning of Atmas in districts. The long-term goal is to make these radio stations self-sustainable through generation of revenue by inviting local advertisements.

He said the responsibility of running these radio stations had been given to the krishi vigyan kendras concerned and these centres, in turn, have outsourced the work to a Delhi-based organisation. The same organisation has also been given the responsibility of content generation.

To ensure that the content generation is done in accordance with the local needs, district-level committees have been set up in both these districts which guide the content generation team. Apart from district-level officials and krishi vigyan kendra scientists, these committees also have members from farming community.