Good evening. My name is Vidya, and today we are going to discuss your health,” says a voice on the radio in rustic Marathi. The station is run from Vidya Pratishthan, a group of colleges near Pune, and the radio jockey is a housewife from a slum.

She is one of 130 women radio jockeys (RJs) undergoing training at 13 campus FM radio stations across the country. They are being trained for 30-minute programmes on women’s issues that will be broadcast by the stations throughout the year.

“We are teaching them interviewing skills, how to use the mike and the voice-panel controls. We’ll also teach them speech modulation and some radio jockey tricks that will make them as good as professional RJs,” said R Sreedher, founder of the country’s first FM radio station and now the director of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre, an intergovernmental agency involved in the project.

A trial run of the project was completed successfully at Anna University, Chennai, last year. That model is to be replicated across the country.

The programmes, in the form of interviews, talk shows, plays, songs, and quizzes, cover topics like anaemia, vector-borne diseases, fertility, obesity, menstrual hygiene, TB, HIV and AIDS.

“We adopted two urban slums from which a thousand women were picked. The health programmes were made based on their needs,” said a former student involved in the Anna University project. “We constantly obtained feedback from them.”

Some of the 13 institutions involved in the project, such as Holy Cross College, Tiruchirapalli, Guru Nanak College, Ludhiana, and Vaishnav College, Chennai, have already started broadcasting. Others like Jamia Millia Islamia and Jagannath Institute of Management, both in Delhi, are completing surveys before they begin broadcasts.

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