NEW DELHI: Keen to push its Community Radio facilitating programme, the Information & Broadcasting ministry is convening an inter-ministerial meeting next week to find areas of convergence, and has also written to state governments on this issue, as most of them have been found to be totally unaware of the programme.

Stating that Community Radio has a massive potential, I&B joint secretary Zohra Chatterjee said that it would also want more seminars and workshops and by itself, would organise at least one workshop in each state capital in the days to come.

Chatterjee stated this today at the EIndia 2007 meet, where she also said that the government has noted and flagged the issue of why none of the 103 applications received so far have been from NGOs or civil society organisations, but rather from educational institutions.

"The term `Community Radio` itself says it is a radio that would serve the specific interests of communities, but the civil society has not come forward for this. We have flagged this issue in the ministry and the state capital workshops would sensitise the NGOs to come forward for this," she said.

Of the 103 applications received so far, all from institutions, agreements have been signed by the government with 42 parties; letters of intent have been issued to 63 parties, and 26 of the 42 are actually operating.

However, she added that there was underutilisation of spectrum as most of the operators went on air for a few hours a day at the most, as and when the members of that community found time.

She said this needs to be studied, but said that the feedback received so far shows that even these 26 were (in content and ownership) not representative of the community and so far the purpose of the programme has not been achieved.

The government is also considering the proposed 5,000 licenses it plans to issue to be divided into sectors, such as farming community, fishing community, women and children and others, and issue the licenses accordingly.

Chatterjee said: "There are other ministries in the government who also have developmental work to do and their messages need to reach out to the communities, and CR can be a powerful tool in that.

The I&B ministry also plans to use the offices of the other departments to identify the `good NGOs` in the respective fields of work and train and empower them and subsequently issue the licenses to them, indicating that the programme, in the absence of ground level interest, could be modulated to the government`s perceive needs of communities.

Responding to one suggestion from a panellist at the meet that the ministry would need to issue a GO (government order) to bring CR as a part of school curriculum, Chatterjee said that even if that is not possible, it could be introduced to schools as special interest clubs.

Chatterjee also spoke of the need to work with the Information Technology ministry`s Community Service Centre project to converge their activities and use CR as a tool for information dissemination on the products and services of both the government as well as the private sector.

Chatterjee thanked the international organisations like Unesco and Unicef, which had helped organise E-India and said there would more meetings with them for learning from their experiences globally to make the Indian programme a success.

She ended her address at the valedictory session saying that the AIR stations across the country could be looked at for developing partnerships with NGOs to help start developing and broadcasting programmes for communities before the NGOs can actually set up their own stations.

It is learnt that the organisers, including CSDMS, Unicef, Unseco and others would write a detailed report on the recommendations made at various sessions of the CR seminars and workshops at E-India 2007 and table them at the ministry for their consideration.

Earlier in the day, I&B director Arvind Kumar clarified on the issue of news not being allowed on CRs, saying that the present policy stops users from using it for political purposes and relevant information for the community could not be barred from the community radio stations.