One could, of course, ask whether the Internet is required at all in rural areas, given that most of the population is only semi-literate. But this is a flawed argument. The Internet today goes beyond text and includes video, audio, images, and even caters to local vernacular languages. This makes a lot of content relevant to a much larger demographic. Second, the Internet has also become the primary vehicle for delivery of transaction-oriented applications such as buying a train or bus ticket, or making bill payments, and hence is more relevant to rural areas for making it easier to conduct such transactions.

A number of research groups have developed different technologies to provide connectivity in remote rural areas, and I will talk about some of them in subsequent posts. In this post, I will describe an innovative project called VLink done by the Tetherless Computing Group at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The group, led by Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, has been working in this area for the last four years. There were two main principles behind much of the philosophy followed by the group:

• Delay reduces cost: When we normally think about the Internet, we think of it as an always-connected medium where users can surf the web, browse pictures, view videos, etc, all on an instantaneous basis. But this is not always necessary for many applications. For example, if you want to send an email, it is immaterial whether the email gets delivered to the recipient's mailbox instantaneously or a couple of hours later, because the recipient will only see the email the next time that they log onto their computer.

Similarly, if you want to buy a train ticket, it should be sufficient if you were to put in a request right now and receive the ticket the next day when you log on. The drift here is that for many applications, technically called delay-tolerant applications, you need not always be connected to the Internet, and even delayed connectivity is fine to a large extent. The insight of this project is that if users are willing to tolerate some delay, it can significantly reduce the cost of providing Internet access, as I will soon describe.

• Applications and communication medium are separate from each other: Consider various examples of applications such as email, ticket booking, video download, picture download, etc. None of these applications really depend on whether the underlying medium of communication is a satellite link, or a broadband link, or maybe even a dial-up link. And the Internet has been designed in such a manner that different communication technologies can be substituted for each other, but the applications will still work. In technical language we call this layering, meaning that applications work at a higher layer than the communication medium, and as long as the roles and responsibilities of layers are cleanly separated from each other, higher layers won't care about how the lower layers are implemented.

VLink used these two principles to develop a software framework on which delay tolerant applications could be built, and different communication channels could be used in the underlying layers for moving bits to and from the Internet. These communication channels include the following:

• Vehicles to ferry data: Vehicles such as cars and buses that regularly travel between villages and cities are fitted with a wireless router that runs from the vehicle's battery. This router carries a hard disk and supports WiFi. When the vehicle drives past a kiosk in a village, it wirelessly picks up data from the computers in the kiosk, stores this data on the hard disk, and pushes the data off into the Internet when the vehicle drives through a WiFi hotspot that is connected to the Internet. The same process is used to fetch data from the Internet and deliver it to the kiosk.

Even if the vehicle does not stop as it passes a kiosk, the 5-6 seconds of connectivity are sufficient to transfer almost 200MB of data. The system supports all sorts of additional features such as retransmission of data if a vehicle breaks down midway, duplication of data on multiple vehicles to increase the chances of speedy delivery, fragmentation of data so that different parts of the data can be transferred through different vehicles, etc.

• USB keys: Probably the most robust method of data transfer, USB keys are cheap, can provide gigabytes of storage, and can be carried around virtually anywhere humans can go. VLink uses USB keys as a communication medium, and, similar to vehicles carrying data, the data can be split across multiple USB keys, duplicated, retransmitted, and reassembly works regardless of the order in which different data fragments arrive at the destination. In fact, some fragments could be brought in over USB keys while others over vehicles, and everything will still work!

• SMS: Although a very non-intuitive mechanism, it actually makes a lot of sense. VLink can fragment data into 160-byte chunks that can be text-messaged to the destination and then reassembled. This is especially useful for data that needs to be delivered urgently, for example, a high priority email, which cannot wait for somebody to carry a USB key or for a vehicle to drive past. VLink can internally infer that such short high priority messages can be sent over SMS, while larger non-urgent messages can be sent over video.

Robust and Low Cost

Such non-conventional communication mechanisms actually end up being very robust and low-cost. The cost of wireless routers on vehicles gets amortized across all kiosks that a vehicle visits. Similarly, USB keys are cheap and a key can be handed to practically every single person who moves between a village and city. SMS is also available practically everywhere, and in fact many countries such as India have bulk SMS plans to allow the user to send many SMS messages in one single go.

The VLink group has also built some useful applications on this platform. A Flickr application fetches pictures matching a search term, a YouTube application similarly searches and downloads video, an email application delivers email, etc. An open API is also provided, which allows developers to build other innovative delay tolerant applications as well.

Different parts of the VLink system have even been piloted in many locations. A vehicle-based pilot was done in the village of Anandpuram near the city of Vishakapatnam in India, where VLink was used to move e-governance forms for birth certificates, income certificates, and more to the Internet.

A pilot in Ghana helped connect a central hospital in Accra with rural clinics, enabling nurses in remote locations to consult with doctors in the city. And even at Gram Vaani, we plan to use USB keys to ship logs from remote community radio stations to the Internet so that we can analyze them to find bugs, before sending back upgrades and patches to be automatically applied to the systems running at different radio stations.

For more information, you can either write to me because I worked on many parts of the project for my thesis, or you can write to Prof. Keshav, or leave a comment here and we will get back to you.

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System.

GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to share and stream content with other GRINS deployments. Some of the key features of GRINS that distinguish it from other radio broadcast platforms are as follows:

• Commodity hardware: GRINS does most processing in software to eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware, and yet imposes very low processing overhead on the system. For this reason, GRINS can be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations.

• Service oriented design: All functionality provided by GRINS is handled by different services, such as the Audio Service for playout, Archiver Service for recording, Library Service for storage, etc. Each of these services can be run either on a single machine, or off
  multiple machines. This makes the deployment of GRINS extremely flexible to be able to fit into any kind of a radio station setup.

• Application development platform: The open API of GRINS allows third party developers to build their own radio applications using the various underlying services that GRINS provides. For example, you can build specific applications for the broadcast of educational programs
  or health programs, that allow quick search and playback features for the respective topics. In the future, once GRINS begins to support the telephone, video, and Internet planes, these applications can even be multiplanar in nature.

• Easy to use UI: The GRINS user interface has been especially designed keeping in mind the target population of rural areas in India and other developing countries. The use of large icons and simple navigation makes GRINS easy to use even for radio operators who are new to computerized systems.

• Diagnostics: A key feature of GRINS, the system can actually detect any network faults or audio cable errors or poor audio quality through DSP, and guide the operators on how to fix the problem locally. This reduces the down-time of the system so that radio stations located in remote rural areas do not have to wait for a technician to visit them and fix small problems.

Please navigate the following links to know more about GRINS:

• Screenshots, and download/installation instructions
• Configuration wizard to understand how GRINS can be plugged into your existing radio station setup

In just a few weeks, we will do out first pilot with Radio Bundelkhand, the community radio station in Orcha, India set up by Development Alternatives. And we will also demo GRINS during the upcoming C4FCM conference at MIT.

It has honestly been a tremendous effort. Building such a comprehensive system in 5 months, with over 50,000 lines of code is no joke! We are very fortunate to have such a gifted technology team at Gram Vaani.

And do visit the Gram Vaani website to stay updated on our progress.

Technological goals

• Low cost: Clearly one of the most important requirements, we figured early on that specialized hardware such as audio switchers and breakout boxes add to the cost of setting up a community radio station. Therefore we decided to do as much stuff in software as possible, so that a single desktop PC could be used as a library store, a broadcasting system, an archiving system, a telephony server, all in one. The challenge of course being that how do we overload so much functionality on to a single box, while still preserving good audio quality? Well, that's where good software design comes in!

• Robust in challenging climatic conditions: India is a hot country. Temperatures in the summers go up to 48C in most interior areas. Add to that all the dust that blows around, and keeps increasing as deforestation progresses unabated. Whatever hardware we use, it must be able to sustain such harsh climatic conditions because air-conditioning a radio station only costs more money.

• Platform independent: Our system should provide a user interface for both Windows and Linux. Windows because most Indians really prefer Windows since familiarity with Windows helps them get better jobs. License costs are really not a problem because pirated copies of XP are available in abundance. And Linux because it's much better, and because many non-profits are now waking up to the power of truly free and open-source software, and are pushing the upcoming community radio stations in India to start using Linux.

• Flexible and incrementally deployable: Our system may not always be used in greenfield setups only for new community radio stations. Existing radio stations may want to use our system as well, but would need a migration path to gradually move various functionality one at a time to our system. Therefore, it should be versatile enough to be able to fit in a plug-n-play manner in almost any radio station setup, and be continuously reconfigured to gradually handle more and more tasks.

• Easy installation and configuration: For increased outreach, we want users to be able to simply download our software, buy the recommended hardware, follow the installations instructions, and get ready to go. This means that installation and configuration should be brain dead simple because many of our users may not be tech savvy to follow complicated setup instructions.

• Remote maintenance: Since it will not be feasible for our technicians to travel long distances to remote radio stations to handle any misconfiguration failures or software bugs, we would like to fix things remotely to the maximum extent possible. But this can be quite challenging because most stations may not have Internet connectivity unless we set up some kind of a system for them. It may seem like a chiken and egg problem, but we think we have solutions!

• Low power consuming: Given the erratic power situation in Indian villages (and cities), and the high costs to set up a soundproofed diesel generator, we want to use low power consuming hardware so that it can just run off solar. Unfortunately though, the lower power consuming a computer is, normally lower is its computational capability.

• Platform to build applications: Although this appears as our last goal, it is indeed a very important goal that deserves some explanation. What is a platform and what is an application? As an over-simplified analogy, if you consider the Internet as a platform that provides data connectivity, then email or youtube or amazon are examples of different applications built on this platform by leveraging the connectivity features provided by it. In the same manner, our platform essentially enables radio broadcast, archiving, library categorization and search, and telephone dial-in/dial-out features. But these features can be mixed and matched to build different applications on our platform. A marketplace is an example where people can dial into the radio station, record local classifieds, and the ads can later be played out over radio. Similarly, agricultural consultancy is an application where an expert can dial into the radio station and conduct a live broadcast, or even reply to questions put up by the audience. A poll is another example where people can dial into the radio station or send SMSes to record their responses, which can later be statistically plotted and analyzed. For each of these cases, we want our platform to provide an API that exposes the underlying radio/telephony/library services, and allows these services to be easily composed into complex applications. The reason for doing this is obvious -- a generic platform design which can be used to build innovative applications that we may not have even thought about right now.

System design

So, what have we done to be able to meet these goals?

• One-box system: We are currently using one of the m-series Via mini-ITX platforms that run at 533MHz. These are small boxes, something like 7"×2"x8", which have a power consumption of the order of 20W. We are testing this on a Soekris box as well, which has an even lower power consumption.

Another advantage with our one-box design is that it can either be used as a radio broadcast console in itself, or, as shown in the figure below, it can be plugged into an existing radio broadcast system. Here, the server for audio broadcast/archiving/telephony runs on the box, while the UI runs on the standard Windows or Linux PC used by the radio station. This plug-n-play design makes our system quite flexible to fit in practically any radio station setup, or to even start a radio station from scratch.

Many of the Via and all the Soekris models also come with large heat sinks without a fan. Not having a fan is a great help because fans are really not good in dusty environments. They get dirty quite soon, and if not maintained properly, then the CPU is endangered of over heating and cooking itself.

• Good software design: It is hard to explain this in detail, but we have managed to keep our software with a very low memory footprint. The UI currently runs in 30 MB, and the server side services consume another 20-30 MB. We were able to do this by designing a custom in-memory cache that eliminates multiple copies of the same data object, and also reduces the amount of database accesses. This makes our software very responsive, kind of in an AJAX like manner for web applications.

• Java: We chose to write our UI and much of the server in Java, which makes our system platform independent. The UI can run in both Windows as well as Linux, whichever may already be in use in the radio station.

• No CPU scaling: CPU scaling is enabled by default in most systems. This means that if a computer normally runs at 533 MHz, it can be over-clocked to almost 1 GHz if required. This scaling normally happens automatically using different governor algorithms when the CPU utilization increases beyond some pre-defined threshold. We noticed two disadvantages with CPU scaling though. One, the act of scaling caused disturbances in the audio quality. Second, running the CPU at a higher frequency would increase its temperature, and a watchdog would then shut down the computer when the temperature got too high. It is worth mentioning how we identified these issues though.

We monitor audio quality in an automated manner by generating a sine wave at a fixed frequency, and then draw the audio output into a another computer where we observe the primary frequency component of the audio being received. In a perfect transmission, we would get a single peak on the same frequency at which the input sine wave was generated. But we found that at exactly the times when the CPU would scale to a higher frequency, we would miss out some audio samples. So the scaling itself was not happening smoothly.

The temperature issue was even more interesting. Everything would work perfectly if we tested our system during the day. But interestingly, if we would leave it running all night, playing and archiving audio just to do a stress test on the robustness, very often the temperatures would rise and the CPU would freeze. We finally figured that this was happening because during the day we would have the air-conditioning turned ON in our office, but at night, since the hot Indian summers are rapidly setting in, the room temperature would rise and the CPU would get too hot!

As a safeguard, we have therefore disabled CPU scaling. We found that it was not required anyways, except maybe when we would encode a wav file into an mp3, because the encoder would take a lot of CPU. However, we do this encoding lazily and therefore it is not critical if it gets done in 30 seconds or 1 minute. We actually monitor the idle state of the system, and if it has been idle for more than a prespecified time interval, it is only then that we initiate an encoding operation.

• Log shipping and upgrades: Until the time we do not build systems for Internet connectivity of the radio station, we have designed a low-tech method for remote maintenance. Whenever a USB key is inserted into our box, all system logs get copied on to this USB key. And if the key is brought over to a city that has Internet connectivity, and inserted in a computer connected to the Internet, then our software automatically picks up the logs and mails them to us. We can then analyze these logs, check for any errors, and if an upgrade is required, then copy a patch to the same USB key. When this key is now inserted back into the box at the radio station, the upgrade is performed automatically. Thus, unless there are some serious hardware errors which may require our attention, software errors and bugs can be handled through this USB transport system without requiring us to visit the radio station.

• Service oriented design: All of audio broadcast, archiving, library search, and telephony are named as "services" in our system. An easy way to understand this concept is that our platform provides certain "services", and applications can be written which use these services. Each service exposes an API to the basic functions it provdes, and applications use this API for their custom functionality. Anybody can then write an application using this high-level API without having to worry about the internals of audio playout or telephony, etc. In fact, we plan to work with students in various places to have them conceptualize and write all sorts of different applications.

Meeting the goals

We are extremely confident that our system design will be able to meet the goals outlined above.

• Our one-box setup is as low-cost as it gets. The mini-ITX box with a hard disk costs around $300, plus an extra good quality USB soundcard for $50. We will keep adding new components over time such as an FXO telephony card, a WiFi card, and an FM transmitter card, but the costs should hopefully remain under $1000. The software is of course going to be free!

• Having a fan-less box, and canceling CPU scaling, should help our system cope with the challenging climatic conditions of India.

• Java brings in platform independence.

• The plug-n-play and service oriented design makes our system incrementally deployable. It can be simply plugged into any radio station setup, and services for audio broadcast, archiving, library, or telephony can be turned ON and OFF as desired.

• The plug-n-play characteristic of our system also helps keep the installation and configuration process simple. Users just have to plug in audio cables from the right sockets of their mixers into the soundcards mounted on our system.

• Log shipping and automated patching of upgrades through a USB key will enable remote maintenance, albeit at the cost of a delayed response because somebody will have to physically transport the USB key to an Internet connection point. But we feel this should be good enough for now. Besides, since our system will be loosely integrated with a radio station setup, any downtime will not bring the station off the air because basic audio broadcast can still be done using common software such as winamp.

• Low power consuming: Our choice of Via and Soekris single board computers definitely helps to keep the power requirements low.

• Platform based design: We have designed our software in a service oriented manner right from the start. This makes it extremely versatile to be used for many different kinds of applications.

Do stay tuned for more updates. We have our first release scheduled for May. Until then, all of us at Gram Vaani are busy writing code like monkeys! And stress testing our system using brute force like donkeys! But the most interesting part of this project has been of how we have this extremely broad vision of enabling community media to empower people, and how it actually technologically boils down to very detailed nuances of figuring out audio quality and CPU temperature and log shipping, etc. This kind of a unified activity spanning the entire stack from vision to implementation is rarely seen in technology projects, and this is really what inspires our team of how we can make a positive impact on the world through technology.

Historical context

The importance of community media for community empowerment and democratization is well known. And voice based media are especially relevant in the Indian context, given the poor literacy levels in rural areas. However, despite radio being an efficient channel for voice-based community media, communities and independent organizations were forbidden to set up their own radio stations. Pioneering organizations such as Voices and Drishti Media therefore chose a concept called narrow casting to circumvent the policy restrictions. They worked with NGOs Myrada in Bangalore and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (a women collective) in Gujarat to train rural community reporters to produce audio programs just like it would be done in a radio studio. But the programs were played out over loud-speakers in common community meeting points such as near temples and at Panchayat (village level governing bodies) meetings, or within "listener groups" of women working together in mcrofinance self-help-groups. The audio production was itself done in a small studio where eminent village personalities and local politicians were invited for interviews, local artists were called in for recording folk songs, and school children were invited to recite poems and famous speeches by great personalities. Namma Dhwani (meaning, our voices), the setup at the village of Buddikote near Bangalore, even pioneered a new concept called cable casting where they used the cable TV network in the village for broadcast. This was a daring step in many ways against the repressive government policies -- since cable TV was run by local operators, Namma Dhwani could purchase air time cheaply for their own programs even though it could not run its own radio station. The channel of course did not have any video -- just a blank blue screen -- but given the high penetration of television in the community, it was a fantastic outreach channel.

Both the experimental setups near Bangalore and in Gujarat were extremely successful in empowering communities, making them realize their rights, and lobby for their demands from local authorities. Given ready evidence, enterprising activists from organizations such as Drishti, Voices, Ideosync, Maraa, One World South Asia, and many independent individuals incessantly lobbied for a policy change to get permission for radio broadcast. Their efforts were rewarded in late 2006, but the policy still remains mired with many complications.

Community radio policy

Currently, there are a number of points of dissatisfaction amongst the CR community.

• Only non-profits more than 3 years old can apply for a CR license. Although this clause is present to help ensure accountability, it is restrictive for new organizations that want to venture into community radio in a dedicated manner. The older non-profits that are applying for licenses have been working in different streams such as micro-finance, low-cost housing, health, etc, and tend to look upon CR as an outreach channel for their existing programs. However, the vision and mission of CR is substantially broader and a niche domain in itself.

• The license process can take well over a year. It goes through the approvals of almost five different ministries, and if the application is stuck at any point, then there are hardly any avenues to find out. Updates are rarely available on the government websites. The entire process is also very inconvenient for the applicant organizations because they are often asked to supply more details within sudden deadlines, or required to appear in person in New Delhi without any warning. One of the most significant tasks during the application process is also a community survey that is supposed to be filled out by over 1000 respondents. Although surveys are definitely valuable to assess the information needs of the communities, the specific survey mandated by the government is available only in English, and contains a whole host of amusing questions that are completely irrelevant to community radio. Many people behind the CR movement strongly feel that a one-fits-all survey is not suitable in the diverse Indian context, and applicants should be allowed to design their own surveys based upon certain specific guidelines laid down by the government. Fortunately though, the government secretaries are open to suggestions, and the process will hopefully smoothen out over time.

• The FM transmitter equipment for the community radio station can be sold by only three authorized vendors. The newest vendor, Nomad, designs and manufactures indigenous transmitters, and got approval only last year after a long struggle with the bureaucratic red tape. Prior to Nomad, the transmitter equipment was available at a prohibitively enormous cost from the other vendors. At Gram Vaani, although we know that even lower cost alternatives exist, but given the approval difficulties we have deferred our development efforts on the transmitter front, and decided to focus on other components of the CR technology in priority.

• The policy mandates that the CR station should be owned by a non-profit organization. This is very different from policies in Nepal where local communities can pool funds and apply for a license, or in Bolivia where it is mandatory for a CR station to be governed by a council of members elected from the community. This therefore becomes a push-based top-down approach in India, as opposed to a more desirable pull-based bottom-up approach in Nepal and Bolivia. The non-profit organization in India may or may not choose to listen to feedback from the local community, and there have been reports where feedback from certain community individuals was ignored because these people did not participate in the other development programs supported by the non-profit organization. In the same manner, since the community also may not incur any clearly-observable liability from a failure of the CR station, it would effect their levels of engagement with the radio station. Unfortunately a circular problem, this does outline the complexities of participatory community development programs.

Other challenges for community radio stations

CR stations also face other challenges, the foremost ones being financial sustainability and technology.

• CR stations are permitted 5 minutes of advertising per hour. If well marketed, this could help cover the operational costs to run the CR station and pay salaries to the staff. But it is practically infeasible for resource-crunched CR station operators to acquire business skills and look for advertisers while they also produce good quality radio content. We feel that having a central agency like Gram Vaani look for advertising on their behalf will be very helpful. But it is also important to create other revenue streams for community radio. We have a number of interesting ideas based on coupling radio with telephony services, that we will outline in a subsequent post.

• The setup used by most stations is quite basic -- just a computer and mic, connected to the FM transmitter via a mixer. Although simplicity is good, the lack of interactive systems such as telephones, field reporting tools, and content sharing, makes it harder to sustain engagement from the community. Even software used to run the radio station can have a significant impact on its success. Most CR stations currently use Winamp to play out radio programs, and have to resort to hacks to do live broadcast, or interleave advertisements between programs. A professional radio automation system is very necessary to scale activities, but currently there is no free and open-source system that provides a one-stop solution to playout, broadcast, telephony, SMS, and Internet content sharing.

The current push behind the CR movement

We are very glad that our Knight funding came at an opportune time to enable us to make a significant impact in the growth of community radio in India. Gram Vaani is among the early players in the area of improving technology for community radio, and building a business model around making CR stations financially sustainable. Please take a look at our earlier post on details of the kind of software and hardware systems we are building for community radio. We will shortly also write about our current thinking on the business model of enabling services through radio and telephony.

The Gram Vaani team and other CR activists are also part of the Community Radio Forum, a pan-India collective whose most important mandate is to lobby for legislative changes on the CR policy front. The third annual meeting of the CR Forum was held last month at a small town called Orchha, in the Bundelkhand region of India. Orchha was chosen because the very first community radio station licensed under the new policy was established there by Development Alternatives five months back. It was widely attended by almost all organizations in the community media space in India, including Gram Vaani. Anita Iyer from Radio and Music has written a detailed article on the meeting. Please do take a look for more information and some fantastic pictures.

The road is long, as all roads always are, but it has been a terrific start so far. The one thing I can definitely vouch for though, is that the enthusiasm and commitment of the CR community in India is undying, and will continue to push the horizons of community media indefinitely.

The garage startup mode

I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day and night drinking coffee and coding. Sometimes he also listens to Pink Floyd and drinks beer, and believe me, Java programs written under the intoxicating influence of Floydian melodies most often produce results that can at best be described only as "interesting".

Well, here's the rest of the story. I wrapped up my PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo in October 2008, and moved back to India in November. My first month was pretty much spent in settling down in New Delhi. Although I have lived in India all my life except for the last five years in Canada, the rate of change here has been tremendous and it took me quite a while to feel that I was back at home. I finally found a good place to stay, and we set up the Gram Vaani office in one of the rooms in my house. A couple of tables, a couple of chairs, a couple of computers, and loads of audio equipment all over the place! It is indeed no different from operating a garage startup, except that this startup is not here to make big money but to pursue a big vision for community media.

And we are not alone in this vision. Bala, a very close friend, was with me at Waterloo. He did his Masters in computer science from Waterloo and was working for a while in India before joining Gram Vaani earlier in January 2009. The third member of our technical team, Zahir, will also be joining us in another week or so. Zahir is doing his PhD in computer science from IIT Bombay in the area of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). His thesis is already centered around wireless networks for rural areas, and so Gram Vaani will pretty much form a part of his thesis.

But we will be getting out of this garage mode quite soon. Our proposal for incubation at IIT Delhi, one of the premier engineering universities of India, was recently accepted. We will move to our new office in a few weeks. The IIT incubation is extremely useful because it will avoid significant bother for us on the infrastructure setup, give us a lot of credibility, and also provide access for collaboration with the students and faculty at IIT.

The technology

We now have a good handle on the technical design and tools that we will be using. Our first step is to build a radio automation system that goes beyond much of what is already available on open-source. This automation system will provide the following kinds of features:

• Playout and scheduling of audio programs
• Archiving of live broadcasts
• Semantically searchable media library for storing audio, video, image, and text content
• Telephony support to allow audience to dial into the radio station and share their viewpoints, both online and offline
• SMS support to allow audience to send SMSes to the radio station

And all this hosted on off-the-shelf hardware components, at a cost less than $1000 per community radio station.

The second step will be to connect radio stations situated in remote geographical areas to the Internet. We will do this using long distance WiFi links because broadband of other infrastructure based forms of Internet access are not available in rural areas. This will allow us to provide the following additional features:

• Content sharing platform to let radio stations to exchange content with each other
• Conduct simultaneous syndicated broadcasts across a series of radio stations
• Service hosting platform to push advertisements, agricultural advice, news updates, NGO feedback, etc to the CR stations

The third step will be to use FM PCI cards for radio broadcast, instead of the standard FM transmitters that are big and clunky and expensive. Our goal is to keep the hardware and setup cost for the entire system, including Internet connectivity, below $2500 per community radio station. But this is in no way going to be easy. Reduction in hardware cost implies that we will be doing more and more processing in software by eliminating external components such as mixers and audio switchers. This means that our implementation has to be extremely efficient to ensure that audio latency is minimal, despite the increased computation. Plus, our choice of computation platform is governed by its power consumption, so that it can run on solar power since the electricity situation in Indian villages is extremely erratic; this potentially leaves us with platforms like Soekris or Via boxes which have only 533MHz to 1.6GHz computational capability. Other than tackling such performance issues, we will have to ensure that our system is robust and can be locally repaired through simple troubleshooting guides or telephone calls because it will not be easy for technicians to travel to remote villages for repair services, the travel time some times being up to 3 days one way.

The bottomline -- we are having a lot of fun building this system because it is so real and challenging!

The business model

Our technology is going to reduce the setup cost for anybody putting up a community radio station. They will only have to purchase off-the-shelf hardware, download our software, and follow instructions to set it up. But how are the radio stations going to sustain themselves over time? The policies in India do allow for five minutes of advertising per hour, but getting advertisers to actually pay can be quite difficult. How can a small non-profit operator in a remote village convince some big company to pay them a minuscule percentage of their advertising budget? The lack of accountability, reachability, and business skills are significant problems here. Gram Vaani's model is to search for advertisers on behalf of the radio stations, and then distribute the revenues to the radio stations that broadcast these advertisements. As is said, it may be easy for a big fish to talk to a big fish, but not easy for many small fish to talk to a big fish. Gram Vaani may not be a big fish itself, but we are confident that over time we will be able to create visibility for community radio among corporate groups looking for rural outreach.

Internally, we prefer to consider advertisements as a kind of service. Gram Vaani will also help provide other services by connecting community radio stations with various information providers. For example, health agencies can be considered as information providers that want to push health related educational information to rural areas. Similarly, agricultural institutes, microfinance agencies, health insurance agencies, etc are all interested in reaching out to rural areas -- we will help connect them with the radio stations, and build an integrated billing and revenue sharing infrastructure so that the community radio stations can acquire sufficient content for programming and sufficient financial revenues to sustain themselves.

Two other founding members of our team, Mayank and Parminder, are actively talking to various groups and radio stations to formulate the business model in greater detail. Mayank is an MBA from IIM Lucknow with a great deal of strategy experience for various businesses. And Parminder has already been working on information services in rural areas -- his sister company, eGovServices, helps put up Internet kiosks in villages to provide e-governance services. The technical and business teams wonderfully complement each other and it is an exciting exercise during our common meetings to understand each other's terminologies and language and thinking methodologies.

The way forward

Other than figuring out the technology and the business model, there are many more issues. How do we get community radio to scale in India? Do we leave the movement to pick up on its own pace, or can be do better? Maybe talk to governments and convince them to give funds for statewide networks of radio stations, or convince corporate groups such as vernacular newspapers to do the same, or maybe banks... We continuously think and debate about these issues to figure out the best way forward. But scaling a bottom-up community initiates in a top-down planned manner has a different challenge to it. How do the communities get a feeling of ownership of the radio stations if it was created without their involvement? Maybe we need to evolve a system of joint ownership of the radio stations, part of it being owned by the government or some company, and part of it by the community; financial ownership is probably the first step towards inculcating operational ownership. Unfortunately, the current community radio policy in India does not permit this kind of a organizational setup. But maybe there are other ways and only time will tell. We are prepared to learn as we go along, and adapt our methods based on what we learn. Please do stay tuned on more updates.

Opening for a technical architect: Your job will be to architect the system and lead the development efforts.
* 3+ years of experience
* Computer science or electronics graduate having done courses/projects in computer networks, operating systems, and design patterns
* Extremely innovative, imaginative, and able to deal with independence
* Ability to prioritize and set deadlines for self and the team
* Experience with the design of large object-oriented systems
* High level of expertise in C++, Java, Java Swing, Perl, Python, Shell scripting
* Very very comfortable on Linux
* Ability to quickly research and master unfamiliar tools and technologies
* Feels excited about traveling to remote rural locations and interacting with the people
* Familiarity with Asterisk, GStreamer, and audio on Linux is a plus
* Familiarity with WiFi and IP/analog telephony systems is a plus
* Familiarity with basic electrical circuit design is a plus

Opening for a lead developer: Your job will be to help develop the system according to requirements.
* 1+ year of experience
* Likes to take initiative to explore new ideas
* Expertise in C++, Java, Java Swing, Perl, Python, Shell scripting
* Very very comfortable on Linux
* Ability to quickly research and master unfamiliar tools and technologies
* Feels excited about traveling to remote rural locations and interacting with the people
* Familiarity with Asterisk, GStreamer, and audio on Linux is a plus
* Familiarity with WiFi and IP/analog telephony systems is a plus
* Familiarity with basic electrical circuit design is a plus

Location: Positions are based out of Delhi. If you need to relocate, we will try our best to make your move as comfortable as possible.

Energetic startup working environment. Very competitive salaries, best in the market. Everybody codes. Lots of opportunities -- you define your limits. Team work is imperative. Having fun@work is guaranteed :)

Our team: Aaditeshwar Seth did his PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and his BTech in computer science from IIT Kanpur. He is an ICTD researcher, a seasoned entrepreneur, and was awarded as the best all-rounder of the graduating class of 2002 from IIT Kanpur. Parminder Singh is a serial entrepreneur having already founded two companies prior to Gram Vaani. He did his MTech and BTech in information technology from IIITM Gwalior, advises the government on e-governance strategies, and has won numerous awards in business development at the national level. Mayank Shivam did his MBA from IIM Lucknow and his BTech in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur. He works for McKinsey and is credited with having won almost every single leadership and academic award in existence in his graduating class.

Please email your CV to: aseth@gramvaani.org
Website: http://gramvaani.org

I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk model would have been much cheaper, and it could even have encouraged a culture of sharing among children. Although this argument is still true to some extent, evidenced by the poor response from pilot projects in Nigeria, but I now appreciate the project for many other reasons. For one, it led big companies like Intel to focus on extremely low-cost designs for computers, which may be used not just by children, but even by adults to access information. Second, these is a spirit of continuous innovation in the project which is critical in order to build an appropriate technology that correctly fits in the context in which children and adults in developing countries would use it. Third, the $75 price tag is fabulous. Considering that mobile phones now cost hardly $20 but these models do not have good text and image displays, the $75 laptop plus e-book reader could be a perfect complement.

Many hurdles still remain though, a prominent one being that Internet connectivity in remote rural areas in developing countries is extremely poor. In India, although state governments are funding SWANs (State Wide Area Networks) to provide connectivity to rural kiosks, it may still take many years for large scale deployment to happen. Solutions to provide connectivity to a central hub in each village using long distance WiFi links or asynchronous connectivity through mechanical backhaul seem suitable. Devices like the OLPC laptop can use WiFi to access downloaded content at the hubs, or periodically upload content such as queries about what crop rotation pattern to follow, or how to set up a small-scale-industry to manufacture mosquito coils, etc.

So how does all of this tie in with the community radio model of Gram Vaani? Community radio is in fact only one technology that we are starting to improve and experiment with, but our goal is more broad, and includes any technology that can be used to improve media delivery and citizen participation in rural areas. In the future, we will also develop systems to enable news delivery on cellphones, and even on devices such as the $75 laptop. These devices have the advantage that their user interface is more suitable to solicit citizen feedback, as compared to radio. Being a broadcast medium, radio of course has other advantages in terms of community involvement and reachability. Therefore, one avenue of innovation for us will always lie in understanding the epistemological characteristics of different media, and to use them in a complementary manner to best serve society.

But we soon realized that providing a communication infrastructure to rural areas is not even half of the story. It is useless unless appropriate applications are not built on this infrastructure. One of the most powerful applications to catalyze development is that of news. News media is of fundamental importance not only to improve democracy and responsible politics, but also to supply useful information to educate the rural population about health, entrepreneurship, and employment, and to give them a platform to voice their demands and opinions to government agencies and social development organizations.

Pieces of the vision fell into place when the Government of India announced the licensing process in 2007 to allow NGOs and educational institutions to set up community radio stations. Community Radio (or CR) is one of the most effective methods for education and media delivery. Radio is extremely low-cost and most people in rural India already own a radio-set, or at least, are close to one at restaurants and various public congregation places. Furthermore, community radio programming involves the local community in creating programs, which makes the content highly contextual for the rural population. This is much better than broadcasting radio or television programs at a national or even at a state level, because India being such a diverse country, each small village and town has its own context of understanding information.

Immediately after the CR licensing announcement, I got together with Mayank and Parminder, and wrote a proposal on how CR stations could be built using PC-based FM transmitters at a much lower cost than most commercially available radio transmitters, and how these stations in different villages could be connected together to the Internet using KioskNet or other low cost communication solutions. This combination of community radio and Internet connectivity becomes a very powerful concept, because not only can extremely contextual information be provided to rural areas through local radio stations, but the radio stations can be connected to government agencies, NGOs, agricultural research institutions, and news agencies, to supply useful information to the rural population. A reverse-channel from the villages to cities is also automatically enabled, to enable problems faced in rural areas become known to the rest of the world.

The progress from that point was straightforward. We collected all sorts of information about the state of radio in India, got in touch with many NGOs to understand their concerns, and the result was a proposal to start a non-profit organization called Gram-Vaani, which stands for voice-of-the-village. The aim of Gram-Vaani is to build low-cost technology for these radio stations, and to connect them with government agencies and NGOs who are looking for an outlet to supply information to rural areas. We call this an ecosystem of information producers and consumers. An ecosystem is really the most appropriate metaphor for our vision, because each entity in this ecosystem relies of other entities for its informational needs. Rural communities need educational information from NGOs and news about development schemes launched by the government, and the NGOs and governments in turn need feedback about the status and impact of their programs in rural areas. In fact, the ecosystem metaphor applies to practically all aspects of progress in economics and human development, because of the fundamental interconnectedness of all people in the world. Making the network of interconnections more efficient is really what we are trying to do in Gram-Vaani.

But this is only the beginning, When I look back over the last few years of my PhD and think how all these ideas came into being, I am amazed at how much our thinking has matured and how far we have come along. But I am even more amazed with the realization of the massive chasms that need to be bridged yet to turn our vision into a reality. This is really just the beginning even of the beginning! We are absolutely confident that we can build the technology. But that needs to be supplemented with actual groundwork by our collaborating NGOs who are in fact the only ones who can ensure that the technology gets used to its maximum potential. And that needs to be supplemented with a huge amount of work on our side in putting the information ecosystem together by bringing governments and NGOs and educational institutions on the same platform to participate and share information with each other. And when we think about the scale at which we want to operate, which is to help set up 6000 community radio stations all across India, 10 stations on an average per district, then the work to be done seems even more gargantuan. And the challenges never get easier, because in order to achieve this scale, we need to make each radio station financially sustainable. This means that we have to work not only with governments, but also with corporates looking to expand to the bottom-of-the-pyramid markets. Taking all our partners forward together towards one coherent vision will require a large amount of collaboration and understanding among all of us.

At this point, let me quote E.F.Schumacher from his book, Small is Beautiful, where he talks about helping the rural population of India.

For helping people to help themselves you need at least two persons to look after 100 and that means an obligation to raise ten million helpers, that is, the whole educated population of India.

The book was written in 1973 and statistics have changed since then. But the message remains the same. The scale of the problems faced in rural India is so huge that we need the educated and more aware sections of society to help us. And that means that we want you to help us. We want you to help us achieve this dream of a happier and prosperous India, free of poverty, unified in spirit, harmonious in existence, and to set an example to the rest of the world of how diversity can peacefully coexist even today.

Please check out the Collaborate and Get Involved sections on the website. And write to us with your ideas and please contribute to the discussions here. A journey of a thousand miles indeed begins with a small step. Join us on this journey and we promise that it will be very exciting and rewarding.