When Sohrab Khan leans into his mike and says "good morning" at 9 am, lakhs of people hear a loud crack before his voice booms through their radios.
Khan is the manager and one of the eight reporters and presenters at Radio Mewat, a community radio station in Nuh, Haryana, considered the country's most backward district. Known as Mewat until 2016, Nuh lies to the south of Haryana, jutting into Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
The radio station has a total of nine employees, with one person overseeing its administration.
In Mewat, only 27 per cent of the households own TV sets, with most people either misinformed or out-of-touch with news. But in the last ten years that it has been in operation, Radio Mewat has evolved to bridge that gap.
Of the 431 villages in Nuh, the radio has the capacity to reach 170 of them. In a poor, insulated district, where not everyone can afford a smartphone or TV, the radio continues to hold popularity.
Though government guidelines prohibit community radios from discussing news, current affairs and politics, when Covid-19 struck, Radio Mewat emerged as a tool to dispel myths around the virus.
"When the lockdown happened, the district magistrate and the chief medical officer came to us to get the word out about coronavirus. We didn't take a day off, and we worked through the lockdown," Khan told ThePrint.
Nine months into the pandemic, Radio Mewat is still keeping its listeners informed about how the pandemic is shaping, and also local events in the district.
The radio runs from 8 am to 10 pm, with a 2-hour break in the middle. But its small team often works overtime to keep it running.
"We use information to empower people, but we're also pushing the envelope without violating the code of conduct while broadcasting what people ought to know," said Archana Kapoor, founder of Radio Mewat and the NGO, Seeking Modern Applications for Real Transformation (SMART).
Source : https://ift.tt/3ndyIpp
Contributed by : sir Jhavendra Kumar Dhruw Raipur .