Experiences of deploying and commercializing a community radio automation system in India

Abstract

Community Radio (CR) stations are short range FM stations that seek to meet the needs of their listeners by involving them in content creation, feedback, and station management. In India, the community radio movement took off in 2008 when the first set of CR stations became operational. During that period we began design and development of the Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System (GRINS), an automation system designed to meet the ICT needs of CR stations. Over the last 2.5 years we have commercialized GRINS and deployed it at 19 CR stations in India and South Africa. In this paper, we present our experiences of software feature design, installation, training, technical support, and commercialization of GRINS in India. We demonstrate a number of aspects: Building a small feature set at first, and then adding features on-demand ensures that utility of the software is maintained and imposition of developers' assumptions is avoided. The common notion of keeping costs low for developing regions should not come at the sacrifice of stability of the solution. Standardization of deployments, even at the loss of flexibility for the customers, is important to keep the costs of technical support low. Through technical support data collected over one year, we show that physical moving parts are easy targets to introduce faults. Although identification of most faults can be done over the phone, remote Internet access is needed to resolve many faults. Finally, we highlight that selling to NGOs is hard; the best way is to club the sale as a part of a larger project for which the NGO is being funded. We believe these insights will be useful to guide others who want to commercially provide ICT solutions in developing regions.