MUMBAI: Mangalore based college St Aloysius will shortly launch its community radio, �Sarang' - celebrating colours of life.

The college representatives signed their GOPA (Grant of Permission Agreement) last week in Delhi with the Information and Broadcasting ministry. The GOPA agreement allows the institute to purchase a transmitter and the college has submitted relevant documents to obtain the WOL (Wireless Operating License).

The college started the process of setting up the community radio in April 2007. Recounting the entire procedure of setting up a community radio, St Aloysius head of dept of Mass Communication & Journalism and Sarang director Dr Richard Rego says, Since we were absolute novices in the community radio field, it took a while to get the Letter of Intent and in October-November, there were queries from the broadcasting Ministry. The process of conducting a survey of the community to gauge the communication needs was time consuming as it took time - to conduct that, analyse, interpret. CEMCA (Commonwealth Educational Media) - an NGO in this field which is doing liaison with the central govt, has been helping us since July 2008....

Sarang aims to reach out to the communities, get them to voice their concerns, issues, challenges etc. Mangalore has a number of very prominent religious, linguistic, social communities in the present context; we want to emphasise the variety and diversity of Mangalore through our radio station. We aim at village communities – agriculture/farming, beedi workers, auto/ truck drivers, fisherfolk etc. We want our students to be sensitised to the realities of local communities....

The station will be heard in Mangalore city and suburbs like Panambur, Suratkal, Batwal, Ullal, Gurpur-Kaikamba and surrounding areas. The content would be basically issues relevant to the community and students: information on agriculture, farming, small industries, medicines/ health/ hygiene, substance abuse, education, English for rural people, some entertainment produced by the community....

Sarang intends to have its students -especially Mass Communication and Journalism as well as people from community to be trained as Jocks. Initially we would have four languages- Konkani, Kannada, Tulu and English to broadcast in as these four languages are dominant in Mangalore; there are a few other languages too and we would like to incorporate them gradually. We already have started producing programmes in these four languages....

The estimated cost of setting up the community radio and infrastructure is around Rs 1.8 million, provided by the St Aloysius college.