The Auroville Radio Story

Auroville Radio celebrated its 11th anniversary on December 5th this year. Despite their busy schedule in the months of November and December, and having to help set up Peridar Kaala Vaanoli (‘Radio in the Time of Extreme Calamity’ in Tamil), a temporary emergency FM radio station for the flood-hit Cuddalore, Andrea and Renu share their stories from Auroville Radio.

How did the idea of Auroville Radio emerge?

Andrea: When I first came to Auroville in 1999, and later decided to live here in 2000, the one thing that struck me was how an advanced community like ours was still using old-fashioned communication methods. The community then only had a monthly newsmagazine Auroville Today, a weekly newsletter News & Notes and Auronet to keep everyone informed about what was going on. I was running a magazine before I joined Auroville and had founded a radio station 35 years ago in Italy. Seeing how most of the community had only partial information about what was going on, I thought, ‘why not get a tool for effective communication?’ That’s how we set up the Auroville Radio.

Renu: I joined the team only last year, but before that I used to have not much option but to frequent the Auroville Today workspace to know what was happening around Auroville,. That too, only in later years after the Auroville Today team took on a role of not just portraying Auroville in a positive light as a message to the outside world, but also critiquing ourselves as and when needed.

Andrea: Auroville is growing but our media are not growing accordingly with the number of people or events or policies and point of views that are evolving dynamically by the day. This creates a gap in our understanding of the reasons behind most of the decision-making that happens within the community. As a multi-cultural and lingual group of people, we need much more innovative communication tools than what we have in place today.

Auroville Radio seems to be much more ambitious than being just a broadcasting station; what would you call your vision?

Renu: We see that in Auroville a lot of energy is put in by the various parties in the field of information dissemination to cover the same story. We aspire to create a ‘Media Hub’, where people can deposit their stories and audio-visual data from their experiences and others can extract this information when required to understand the community or trace its evolution. Another idea is to broadcast live most of the meetings that happen, so that the community members can have a direct understanding and interpretation of the event.

Andrea: Also, the hub in terms of a shared physical infrastructure for all of the community’s media units can help facilitate a process of learning; I can share about something that I don’t know and another member can step up and help me out with it. It not only saves a lot of money but creates a connection between all of the people who are essentially doing the same job.

Do you think radio broadcasting is being ignored by this internet generation?

Andrea: The first radio broadcast stations in India began as early as the 1927s in Mumbai and Calcutta. Commercial radio broadcasting had started in Europe only a couple of years ago. Today, you find that kids between the ages of 14 to 23 are listening to more radio than their parents who grew up in the radio generation. Radio is a more ‘intimate’ media than television or the internet. Gutenberg had started printing books 600 years ago, and even now we continue printing and reading books, with or without the internet. This is just another opportunity to learn; the internet is growing but so is the radio and it is still very much around.

Renu: Surprisingly, in Auroville, it was the first generation of Aurovilians who were not so familiar with the radio technology, and the later generations that joined us embraced this. I believe the radio will always have a particular place in people’s heart and minds, because you have to listen closely to a radio programme, it engages your brain more than the visual distractions that are created in television.

Auroville Radio closed down briefly last year in 2014. What happened?

Renu: There was a conflict between the Town Hall’s management (ACUR) and the Radio for the space, and Andrea decided to close down the service. It took years of dedication from Andrea to create this space for volunteers to come and jump in and find a way to explore Auroville and their interests. So it really upset me when I heard they had decided to shut it down and I decided to help find a way to get around it.

Andrea: And then I ran into her Pour Tous and said, “Renu, I need you!” She was, in fact, already more of a radio person, having experimented with setting up radio stations in Auroville back in the 1980s for greenbelters. She was the right person to get our work back on track at that time, and found her calling in production and administration work.

Renu: I was just wondering what to do next and when Andrea came up with this request. Soon after I realized, ‘this is my spot!’

Auroville radio has just celebrated its 11th year. What has the journey so far been like?

Renu: We have given the opportunity to thousands of volunteers and visitors to come to Auroville and plug in within the community with a role to learn and report. But it took 10 years for us to be recognized as a public service activity and more to gain funding and support from the Foundation. Without this, we were unable to nurture or deepen our content, to take it to a more professional level. We still feel the need to create a stable team before we focus on upgrading our content. We also need a bigger studio where we can produce deeper and more personal content, and can accommodate better equipment.

Andrea: Also we have been finding it hard to engage Newcomers and Aurovilians to take ownership of the community radio station. We want it to become a collaborative service.

Renu: A lot of our time and energy and space is dedicated to training. We even help people with zero skills to start working with this medium. In the midst of doing this,we don’t have much time to evolve the content..

Andrea: The last 10 years have been a struggle just to survive and we were trying to fundraise to help with our maintenances. Now we want to upgrade our content and become a true community radio station; to facilitate our understanding as a community on what it means to be on the path of human unity and of creating a city of 50,000.

What did you do in Cuddalore?

Andrea: Mr. John Nelson of ‘Saranalayam’ a registered NGO from Vadalur, Tamil Nadu had initiated the process and interacted with the district administration at Cuddalore. Along with many other agencies, we lent a hand and helped set up the FM emergency broadcast station within record time. The station is being used to communicate with the affected people and provide relief to them. We keep in touch with these people who help us update through our Facebook page. Our challenge remains the language and distance barrier. But, on the whole, it is a good achievement that the Indian government immediately provided a temporary emergency FM broadcast license for setting up the station in the disaster-affected area.

Renu: We were energized when a call came to help out in the Cuddalore relief work. The government and local NGOs were very helpful and we realized we could also broadcast through FM and reach out to villages that might not have internet access. In Auroville, the FM regulations and therefore the application process for an FM license is complex and it has been very heavy for us with the amount of paperwork as we are approaching it independently. It could have been easier for us if this was done through the Auroville Foundation.

In the future, we wish to organically enlarge our content. We want to introduce multi-cultural aspects in English and Tamil for the benefit of Auroville and the surrounding villages.

The Auroville Radio Team was in Cuddalore at the time this article was written to make an 18 minutes programme for UNESCO’s World Radio Day on February 13 with the theme of ‘Radio In Times Of Emergency And Disaster’.