 So, hi, my name is Ramakrishnan. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a developer. I don't come from the InfoSec world. I'm actually a content guy to start with. But I run an organization called Ideosync Media Combine. Over the last two decades, we've been working on issues around media access, around voice poverty, around freedom of speech and expression. And our primary work has been on participatory communication to bring communication and access to media down to the grassroots. That's been our primary work, hence our work on community radio. So I'm guessing that a lot of people here probably don't know about community radio as a concept, even though it's around in India. So that's what we're going to talk about. And then I'll link it back to this whole idea of what we can do with community radio during an internet shutdown. Yeah, I think that's okay. Okay, it's in the camera. So I'm going to talk a little bit about leveraging community radio. It's not a substitute for the internet. Let's start with that. Okay, so when I asked around my office, my colleagues, what kind of an image they associated with no internet? That's what they came up with. So the no internet dinosaur was what everyone remembered. It was the first image that came to their minds. And in some ways, that's very appropriate because the technology I'm talking about is also a dinosaur of kinds. We're talking about a technology that's pretty damn old. FM radio came about in the 1930s. We're still using that. So I'm going to talk about broadcast radio and specifically within that community radio. So let's start by talking more about what is community radio to start with. We're probably all listening to radio at some point or the other in our cars for entertainment, whatever. We listen to broadcast radio, we listen to the Mirchies and the Hit FMs and the whatever of this world. But this is a slightly different beast, the one that we've been working on. So essentially when I'm saying community radio, I'm talking about radio that is owned, managed, run, where all the broadcasting, all the content, everything is done by the communities themselves. No interfering public broadcaster, no commercial interests, no media house, for profit media house in the way. So primarily the driving factors are access context, local context and participation by everyone involved. So in that sense, community radio is a tool to empower and enfranchise marginalized communities. It's a way to leverage communication for local development. It's a community resource and a platform for debate. It's a storehouse of traditional knowledge and culture and a way to democratize technology. And isn't that what the internet was supposed to be around for all of us? Somewhere along the way we've lost sight of that and it's become this purposive thing and we have forgotten about some of these ideas when we're talking about the internet. So in India, it's one of the best kept secrets. It's been around for a long time. We've had community radios licensed since 2002. There are 275 community radio stations, community owned, maybe intermediated by NGOs and Krisha Vigyan, Kendra's and other such institutions. But there are 275 across the country. This is a slightly old map. This is from 2016. The pictures changed since. We don't have an updated map right now. It's unique in that it's the only formally licensed community medium available in India today. Most community radios broadcast between four and eight hours. It's probably the only medium to broadcast in local languages in this country at mass scale. So right now we've been able to count about 60 dialect community radio stations which are broadcasting to a potential more than a crore people as we can count them. Though there's no accurate count. No one's ever done a listenership survey of community radio. More of them are rural than urban. Urban spectrum is hard to come by for broadcast right now and organizations like the Wireless Planning and Coordination Committee, WPC, keep giving us blanks on that. And they won't even tell us how much broadcast spectrum is actually available because they treat it as a matter of national security for some reason. Whereas I could actually take a radio and walk around and actually find out who's broadcasting in that area. But they still won't give you a list because they think it's a matter of national security. And like I said, it's currently mediated by NGOs and educational institutions and KVK. So our ideal of having a community radio truly owned by amorphous communities isn't there yet but we're working towards it. So an example, one of the oldest groups in India is Hevalwani Community Radio in Chamba in Tirigadwal in Uttarakhand. It's been on air since 2012 but we've been working with them since 2002. So they had a 10-year run-in before they actually went on air during which time they were actually doing what we call narrowcasting making programs, carrying boomboxes and players from community to community, sitting and doing group listening with them coming back with feedback. They did that for 10 years. That's a lot of dedication. So since 2012, they've been on air. They do 16 hours of programs a day in Gadwali. Before that, briefly, we had access to a WorldSpace satellite radio network channel as part of an international collaboration. They were actually making Gadwali programs sending it to my organization. They're uploading it to the WorldSpace server in Melbourne. It was going up to the WorldSpace satellite and then back down to receivers which we had planted also in the community. So they were actually listening to local radio after a 72,000-kilometer round trip and now, of course, they're broadcasting locally on FM. So currently, they have about an estimated lack of people listening to them and they receive maybe about 500 to 600 calls a day for their programs. So from a tech point of view, community radio technology is FM broadcast technology. There's nothing very complex about it. It's analog frequency-modulated broadcast. It's not digital broadcast yet. The frequency band for FM broadcast is 87.5, actually, to 108 MHz, which is a VHF band. Currently, the policy for community radio allows a 30-meter-high, 100-foot tower height with the antenna mounted at a minimum of 15 meters. The net output power, the effective radiated power that is permitted under the current policy is 100 watts ERP. So basically, that means about a 50-watt transmitter and there's approximately a two-time gain within the antenna cable combo. So basically, a 100-watt ERP output. Essentially, the transmitters are being such low-power transmitters they're actually very basic. They often have 1-watt PLL exciters which are boosted, amplified to about 10 watts and then from there on to 50 or 100 watts, depending on the transmitter you have. One of the things is that broadcast frequencies are regulated fairly heavily and in that sense, there are very few permitted manufacturers of broadcast equipment within the country. You'll notice out of that list that you see the broadcast equipment consultant in India Limited, West Bengal Electronics, Bharat Electronics. Three of them are public sector enterprises, run by the government. Nomad India is one of the brave independent groups which actually started manufacturing transmitters for the community radio sector, but they weren't able to sustain themselves because there just wasn't enough business and the number of stations that got set up were very few. Coverage-wise, it's line-of-sight and typically with a 100-watt ERP that translates to about 12 to 15 kilometers, omnidirectional coverage, but about 12 to 15 kilometers radius in flatland and plains in a high-rise urban area and in the hills, hugely variable. It could be a kilometer in one direction or two kilometers in one direction and 25 into the valley. It's very difficult to tell unless you look at the specific terrain. But given the limitation on the strength of the signal, it basically means you can repeat the same frequencies every 20 kilometers. So especially in non-urban areas, you find that the density of number of stations can improve dramatically where there's no competition for the frequency. Reception, we all know, its ubiquitous FM radio sets are very much available though manufacture has decreased off-late. So while they're still available, Indian manufacturing especially has gone down and a lot of the receiver sets available are Chinese or made abroad. And an important change in the last decade or decade and a half is that radio listening is no longer a group activity. It's become an individual activity, not just because of the fact that FM chips are now often found in mobile phones and people have become used to individually plugging headphones into their ears and listening to it. But while on that, there's an interesting sidelight which is a 2018 study shows that radio in India is still the second most widely used medium after TV and it beats social networking. So all this thing you hear about the death of radio, radios died many deaths many times. It's always come back. So take that with a pinch of salt. Radio listening is still very huge. All India Radio for example still has the largest radio broadcasting network in the world and covers 99.8% of the Indian landmass. There's a lot of infrastructure out there which we actually don't even use properly anymore. The interesting thing is if it's so widely heard and it's still such an important medium why are mobile phone manufacturers either disabling or removing the FM chips from their phones? iPhone is a case in point. One school of thought holds that this is primarily because they want to drive you in the direction of digital listening from online services because then you're trackable whereas on an FM chip you're not trackable as an individual listener and your listening habits can't be so easily read. So privacy concerns there as well in the way we are being driven on to online media streaming services rather than FM broadcast services. But having said that, why am I talking about community radio as a viable alternative in an internet shutdown? Well two or three things. One, there are existing networks and infrastructure. They're already broadcasting, they're on the ground and if you cut off the telecom networks they're already there and they're not dependent on the telecom networks. Second, there's pre-existing reception infrastructure practically in every community. Everyone has at least one FM-enabled mobile phone or a radio set in practically every household still and that provides us a ready-made way in which to reach out to communities and to people in that community. Most importantly, each community radio station is modular, it's not dependent on a network system and it's not dependent on telecom infrastructure. In its 25, 15 to 18 kilometer range it's totally independent. Is it roses, roses all the way? No, it's not. There are challenges. We can't assume that a many to many kind of system in the internet. A many to many communication process can be replaced by what is essentially a one to many or some to many kind of system. So we do have to work out between us and that's one of the outputs I'd hope this discussion could lead to which is how do we create protocols for being able to switch a conversation from the kind of many to many standard views on the internet to a community radio-based process. Two, licensing carries its own problems. All India radio codes and guidelines are applicable on community radios which means essentially that you can say some things and not say some things. But of course the important thing is that a lot of it is dialect based and local language based and currently the government of India does not have a structure to listen to all of it. One of the big challenges you should know that they don't formally allow news on broadcast radio except to all India radio. The commercial guys can't do it and community radios can't do it. One of the reasons they've always been giving the face of our request is until we establish a monitoring system we can't and they haven't in the last decade been able to establish a monitoring system. There is such a thing as the electronic media monitoring cells some of you may be familiar with this where upwards of 800 people sit and watch satellite TV 24 hours a day in shifts of 8 hours. I can't for the life of me imagine a job like that. I can't imagine watching AASTA channel 8 hours a day but having said that there is such a thing is possible because of the structure of satellite radio but it's physically impossible without deploying an army to listen to every community radio in every dialect out there. I doubt the government of India has people who can speak Dacia which is a tribal language in South Odisha and be able to interpret it in real time to check what the content is. So that's a big advantage we have right there in terms of just being far too many for people to monitor and manage and to even understand what's being said in real time. Three, yes it's a broadcast medium equipment is different the skills are not as ubiquitous as handling mobile phones and laptops but having said that it's not rocket science communities, uneducated, illiterate communities have been able to learn these skills and successfully run broadcasting stations. It's not that difficult anymore and increasingly the equipment is so friendly that it's possible to set up a station and run it. So while I'm not recommending that everyone has access to radio licenses, it's perfectly possible to learn the skills of being able to step into the breach and work with existing community radio stations in an emergency when the internet is not available. Fourth, it is a challenge of sorts. It is extremely hyper local in the sense of your 15 kilometer range but most of the solutions we are finding are basically about being able to establish communication between people in a local area during a time of internet shutdown. Reaching out to the larger comes actually at one step removed from that. So in that sense I don't think this is too much for compromise. You should be able to use community radios to be able to reach out if you can establish protocols for how to work with this. Bottom line, it's there. It's ready made. It's working. We should find ways to leverage this rather than reinvent the wheel all the time. This is not in any way to take away from any technology solutions that we are looking at but it's more a request to see how those technology solutions can plug into some of the existing infrastructure that we do have in the form of community radio. So examples, as examples go Uttarakhand, 2013, everyone knows the flash floods that happened there. An important thing to note is that the telecom networks went down but all the seven community radio stations in Uttarakhand at that time continued broadcasting. Did they lose touch with each other? Sure they did. Having said that, they were able to save lives. They were able to coordinate relief work. They were able to reach out to groups in their area. They were able to get everybody moving. They became clearinghouses of information. Two years ago, Kerala in August, 2018, 11 community radio stations in Kerala were able to attend to manage, coordinate relief work in their areas. None of them went off the air. All the telecom networks went down. The only things that were working were police radios but all the community radio stations stayed on air all through the entire 15-18 days where the extreme emergency happened in August of 2018. So we did an extensive investigation of this and we found each one of them did exemplary work in their own areas in terms of being able to keep local channels of information going, being able to connect people, restore lost individuals to their families, lost children to their families to coordinate relief work. So like I said, C.R. Station stayed on the air in spite of the failure of telecom networks. They became local information clearing houses where coordination efforts could be put together and most importantly their existing visibility and recognition and listening habits of their communities became very important because nobody had to look around for source of information. They already were listening to these radio stations. They knew where to tune to get what they wanted. Very importantly, there are local examples in South Asia of stations being able to coordinate with each other during weather events. Bangladesh is a case in point. Telecom network didn't go for a long time and one of the cyclones happened a couple of years ago but 16 stations across Bangladesh were able to coordinate their information and were able to coordinate their warning systems in order to provide a continuous feed of information to their populations and that pretty much covered most of the Bangladesh landmass. So community radio I think provides a lot of possibilities in terms of being able to leverage existing infrastructure to be able to get around the lack of communication during an internet shutdown. I'd be very interested in hearing from all of you who work in a slightly removed world from this to be able to figure out how some of the things you're working on can fit in to expand some of the reach of community radio stations especially restore two way connectivity in terms of feedback from the field and from communities into the radio station for broadcast. We've already explored ham radio as a possible option but that has its own limitations as well. But open to ideas and open to how we can use this. Thanks a lot. Couple of housekeeping announcements before we open up for questions the foods out there if you're hungry please go have it. Do not leave the place without waiting I really recommend that you're here. Now what we're going to do is pose the questions we are also going to have flash stocks. While we end this event we slightly got delayed if you're here I'll tell you where the flash stocks are so you can decide to stay or to go out. The first flash stock is by Arjun on Kaumesh community network. It's a Wi-Fi mesh it's a community owned Wi-Fi mesh. The second talk is by Karan Saini it's on how what a couple of methods on circumventing internet basically internet shutdowns there is the third talk by Gurshap Grover it's on legal content legal contest of internet shutdowns and web censorship on the legal team there's one final flash stock by Mohit Bansal which is on future of intermediary liabilities in India it's based on a SFLC report on the same which will be released tomorrow at 5pm on Indo-international center sorry Indo-Islamic center culture center. Are we taking questions now? Yes sir and we are taking questions please stay back we will take three questions I see three hands and yeah Good evening sir you mentioned the world space network which I think shut down a couple of years back all of those world space networks had a different setup all together that they gave in which did not connect to the normal FM stations at home that's right. To have those world space networks was itself very expensive in a fair and otherwise not very common otherwise so how do we have these systems in place which does not connect to the FM and how do we go about that? Okay this is a decade ago world space closed in 2009 as you know but between 2003 2003 end and 2009 as part of an international development agreement we had access to a dedicated channel and that's what we were using because since there wasn't a community radio policy in this country we had to find a workaround the workaround was being able to broadcast via satellite from outside India essentially and that's how they got local radio at that point. At this point there's no viable satellite radio network that we can use in this form to be able to seed receivers and the receivers were very expensive. You're right. So there were a few companies that had started for community radio which the CCD or the Infosys companies and these private enterprises started for themselves are they still up and working like the timber media was one? There are no community radios under the definition that I'm giving you number one and they probably not licensed under this policy either Okay One question, one quick comment The question is like you still need a license to run a community radio and in your experience how long does it take and I mean from our initial research we found like you need permission from several government departments and it can take a while. There are actually eight central ministries Broadcasting is a central subject so it's actually eight central ministries which give permissions it depends on the kind of organization you are. If you're an NGO then typically it could take anywhere between 8 months and 16 months to get a license but if you're an educational institution often that process is halved what I'm not recommending is for you to start applying for a license when the internet goes down what I'm asking you to do is to leverage existing networks and existing stations that already exist in your area they are more than you think Just to comment on as you pointed out news especially of the political kind is not permitted on community and private FM channels for that matter I mean shameless plug like last year we had argued in a paper that this restriction is unconstitutional essentially and the good news is that private FM stations in Delhi are challenging these restrictions in the Delhi High Court now Not just in the Delhi High Court there's actually a pending PIL in the Supreme Court filed by Common Cause for the last 4-5 years now they actually dismissed it on technical but there's still hope on the legal front correct but bottom line is they know it's a losing wicket and by they I mean the ministry so in that sense they've been backpedaling in the last few years to declare various things as not news anymore this is very funny but that's how it is they've been saying okay local information about sports events is not news this is news to me and they've been saying the prices of vegetables in the Mandi are not news basically things that we would otherwise consider news they've been slowly removing from the definition in order to allow it correct bottom line is it's up to us to be able to do whatever we want with that and couch it in ways as long as you don't say I think they're okay in Nepal during the pro-democracy movement the community radio stations played a sterling role when they were challenged about news news was banned in between on their stations they started writing it in the form of folk songs and singing them and when they were asked they said it's a folk song I'm sure there are ways around that creative ways we can solve the content issue I don't think that's the challenge as much as physically having the infrastructure at a point where we need it there is a lot of no talk of pirate radios in community radio networks but do start talking about it yes my question was you've mentioned a couple of times that this is a licensed framework and you talked about the fact that they can't easily do monitoring but if it's a shutdown and if people are actively using community radio why would you not assume that the government will also immediately indicate the shutdown community radio stations in the area as well the reason why I mentioned this is if you take the Kashmir example it is very clear it's categorical any form of communication the exception of broadcasting complete shutdown so I was curious about it correct that's a good point except that it's a lot harder to reach out to community radio stations in a community radio dense area because you can make a lot of rules but it's easy to come to an internet service provider and say shut it down it's much harder to reach out because let me take an example sometimes they send letter advisories to community radio stations and the government being the government often sends this by post or some equally arcane methodology and 50% of those are never received for example there's currently a set of orders which goes out to community radio stations indicating obliquely that they should all be broadcasting monkey bath 50% of them claim they never received it and it washes they're able to say in all honesty we never received their notification so we didn't broadcast it unless there is a physical enforcement of a shutdown at the location of a community radio station and many of them are in fairly inaccessible areas it's much harder than a telecom service provider to shut down the community radio stations plus procedures wise for documentation that has to come out of INB before a broadcasting radio station can be asked to shut down they can be censured and even then it's a quite a long process of review and notification before they can actually be censured and told to go off air for a few days you'll notice very rarely have even the worst performing of the commercial radios ever been off air for a significant amount of time even when they've put out some really hideous false news so mostly they've received a slap on the wrist or shut down broadcasting processes okay I just had one comment this is the only question or comment that I'm going to make so I think there was this time when MHA issued an order asking all community radios to start recording all of their broadcasts and start sending it back to MHA and people started sending them in like big loads of DVDs because we were broadcasting it for years and MHA suddenly is like send it to us and the government only recognizes DVDs at some level and all DVDs were being shipped to the MHA it got to the point that the MHA said okay stop sending actually it is MIB which asked for it it was the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting by the policy itself everyone is expected like all broadcast organizations to maintain 3 months worth of recordings the past 3 months so on the 91st day you can actually say but 3 months worth of recordings and at some point they woke up to the fact that they wanted to do some content checking because they did not have a monitoring system in place and they asked about 30 stations and notably 30 Hindi speaking stations that's all they could understand 30 North Indian Hindi speaking stations to send in their content and a few of them received a semi-formal slap on the wrist they were invited to the ministry and were told what they were doing right not using parliamentary language that kind of stuff but having said that nobody went off air and they couldn't listen to any of the other languages they could not listen to any of the there are very few in the northeast but there are a lot of South Indian there are a lot of Marathi stations not a single one was invited to send in its content so if you are a non-Hindi community radio station you should feel fairly safe breaking the law so it's like wind talkers the movie where the Navajo wind talkers where the American U.S. military starts using now's language as code so that the Germans can't understand it that even if they intercept radio they won't know what they are speaking so every army unit had an hour drive embedded with them