MUMBAI: The Pune based Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication will start its own community radio, �Radio Symbi' on its premises and plans to launch it by February in the next academic year.

We have already applied for the necessary government licence for our campus radio and  would be starting the radio once we procure the licence..., confirms SIMC Students' Council President Mitin Chakraborty.

Talking about the content, SIMC director Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury states, The content will be largely focused on development issues blending with education, entertainment and can be rightly termed as infotainment. It would comprise issues connected to development of Pune related to infrastructure, ecology largely in the context of the villages in the vicinity where the community radio would be operational. We will have some educational issues like creating a brand of India, panel discussion on issues like on going retail revolution in the country, professional management and professional media education. It will be flavoured with healthy clean youth entertainment with music and non music programmes, plays and many other genres....

Prof  Chowdhury will act as the overall supervisor of the project, but every individual project would have an executive supervisor from the faculty and team of students working on it.

Every student would be contributing to the content either in audio or written form. They would also be contributing in some marketing and public service advertisements to be done for the radio station....

The station will be operated from the SIMC campus in Lavale and would be available within seven km radius initially, an area which might be extended to 14 km radius later. The target audience would be anyone within seven km radius of the campus which would include Symbiosis college which has SIMC, SIBM (Symbiosis college of business management), SITM (Symbiosis college of telecom management), SIT (Symbiosis institute of Technology) apart from that ISBM, FLAME institute is also within seven km, new campus of Bhartiya Vidya Peth and Lavle and other villages in the vicinity,... avers Chowdhury.

The language of communication would be in Hindi and couple of developmental programmes would be in Marathi and others in Hinglish or English. We intend to have initial three to four hours of programming repeated twice preferably in the morning and evening and might increase with the response....

Content production is not much of an issue because we already have a sound recording studio with sound forging in our campus as a part of our courses and the talent contributing to the content would be inhouse anyways. The actual cost is setting up the stations and infrastructure like transmitters for which Rs. 25 Lakhs has been sourced from the college resources....
Radio Symbi would also raise some funds from public service advertisements and educational advertisements. As per the norms of campus and community radio we can have 5 min ads in an hour which need not be typically commercial ads but can be related to social cause related, education or public service advertisements and we look forward to cash on that....

The Pune based Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) has campus radio some time under the guidance of Professor Mullah.