Mahila Sewa Trust, Ahmedabad (the Self-Employed Women’s Association – SEWA) an NGO that works for women empowerment and encourages entrepreneurship – today started its own community radio station 90.4 FM ‘Rudi no Radio'(Rudi’s radio in Gujarati) in Manipur village on Ahmedabad-Bopal-Sanand road. The Radio station would cover 10 km circle area and would be run by rural women of this area, focusing on developmental issues. The community radio station would be managed by SEWA Academy – rural training centre building of SEWA in Manipur village.

The radio station would be managed entirely by rural women who have had no formal training in mass media. The programmes transmitted from the radio station would focus on developmental issues like agriculture, health and water conservation to name a few. All the programmes would be produced by rural women in the local folk style.

Prior to the community radio, SEWA has been running a ‘video cooperative’ – the first of its kind in the country that released 400 documentaries and 2,000 bits of footage on issues that concern marginalised and vulnerable people. The SEWA’s ‘video cooperative’ team comprises women who were vegetable vendors, bidi makers, screen painters and tailors and now they manage the video unit completely on their own.

Backdrop

In April of 2005, SEWA began its first community radio program, entitled Rudi no Radio (Rudi’s Radio), a weekly 15-minute program produced and broadcast by employees of SEWA for a rural audience. In each episode, Rudiben is informally sitting and talking with local members of her village about things that affect them as women and as laborers. The program is symbolically named after our first member of SEWA who worked to spread our association’s wings to rural areas. In that spirit, the program extends to the Ahmedabad-Vadodara area on All India Radio-Ahmedabad (AIR-Ahm.)