A 17-year-old whose father has been worried stiff ever since he began riding the waves with an improvised short-wave transmitter called Radio Reotipur — he has been reaching out to villages in the vicinity with local news and film songs for two years now — has the Ghazipur district administration so impressed that they are ready to “help him in all ways” to make his venture legal.

Son of a private tutor, Arun Kant Rai calls himself the “founder, chief, engineer, producer, programme executive and RJ of Radio Reotipur”. Broadcasting with the help of a 12-volt battery from his room in Reotipur, he has been entertaining the villages of Tilwa, Gopalpur and Pakri with a daily news bulletin — there’s local news too — and film music. On Sundays, he even airs a special programme — the complete audio of a Bollywood hit.

It was AIR’s Vividh Bharati service that gave Arun the idea of starting his own radio station. He scoured the physics books of elder brother Amresh. “I studied physics theoretically but Arun applied it successfully,” says Amresh.

Borrowing “used transistors, transmitter circuit, capacitors, trimmers and chokes from TV and radio mechanics” Arun succeeded in putting together a radio transmitter to cover “a radius of 200 metres on the SW band”.

Father Mahendra Rai dismantled the transmitter — “My father is afraid that I’m committing an illegal act” — but Arun, helped by Amresh and sister Priyanka who chipped in with their pocket money, put it back again.

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