Participants at the Community Radio Awareness Workshop in Bodhgaya on Tuesday. Picture by Suman

The ministry of information and broadcasting would provide grants worth Rs 150 crore for setting up new community radio centres across the country during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period.

Viraili (Samastipur), Barh (Patna) will be provided operating licences for community radio centres this month, apart from the four units that are already operating in the state. This was revealed at a three-day community radio awareness workshop that began in Bodhgaya on Tuesday.

This is the 35th such workshop in the country aimed at creating awareness among people to set up community radio centres.

The ministry of information and broadcasting provides the licence to set up community radio centres to only Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), academic institutions and non-government organisations (NGOs). Around Rs 15 lakh is required to set up a community radio centre that includes a transmitter, a 30m tower and a two-room radio station.

The broadcasting area of a community radio centre covers a radius of 15km.

At the workshop organised by Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (Cemca), ministry of information and broadcasting under-secretary Atya Nand informed the participants that the ministry has a proposal to provide grants worth Rs 150 crore for setting up new community radio centres across the country in the forthcoming Twelfth Five-Year Plan.

Already existing community radio centres will also be provided grants for content generation and sustainability. So far, KVKs, academic institutions and NGOs have made the investment from their own resources. Other ministries like rural development, health, women and child development, social justice, panchayati raj, science and technology and others have also shown interest in funding community radio centres by providing advertisements to publicise the development projects.

For sustainability, the community radio centres have permission to air a five-minute advertisement in an hour, the directorate of advertising and visual publicity rate for which has been fixed at Rs 4 per second. Underlining the importance of community radio centres, Nand said these are different from All India Radio (AIR) and FM radios.

In community radio centres, residents prepare 50 per cent of the programmes in the local dialect. It would provide an opportunity to the people, who do not have a platform to showcase their skills at the state or national level. Local issues could be raised and problems could be sorted out by organising interviews of officials, public representatives and other persons concerned.

At present, four such community radio centres are operational in Bihar in Patna, Bhagalpur and Siwan.

Two other such centres are also in the pipeline, including one each at Vaishali and Hajipur.There are around 130 such community radio centres operational at present across the country. States like Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have most number of community radio centres in India.