Winning a National CR Award is an honour

Yashwant Patil from Radio Madhuban shares his thoughts on winning the national award.

OneWorld: What does it mean to you to win this award?

Answer: An honor to the work done by the local community volunteers from Abu Road and Mount Abu. They now understand the concept of community radio and came forward to take ownership of programmes, production and broadcast.

OneWorld: How does it feel winning more than one award?

Answer: Motivated! We run 35 programmes every week all produced by volunteers. As we are now in the ninth year of broadcast, and received two National Awards for 2018 and one for 2019. May be we can say that Radio Madhuban’s programming is going in the right direction, which is for the community, by the community.

OneWorld:  Did you produce programmes  specifically to apply for awards or did you send your best programmes for awards?

Answer: These programmes were part of our usual programming. We just found them most suitable for the awards.

Nanhe Sitare (1st Prize – Community Engagement – 2018): This was a platform for local tribal children to speak on radio.

Opno Samaj (3rdPrize – Promoting Local Culture – 2018) : This programme documented most of the tribe and their culture which exist in and around Mount Abu.

Ganv Ri Batein (1st Prize –Promoting Local Culture – 2019): This programme increased number of visitors in a local government museum and hence created a visible impact. This inspired us to apply in this category.

The shared programme was one of the good programmes under the series that shows the PPCP (Public Private Community Partnership) model at work.

OneWorld: What is your message for CR stations to encourage them to apply for CR awards in future?

Answer: CR stations should read the guidelines very carefully, bullet out things and submit programmes which were successful in creating a visible impact. This will help them to score awards.

OneWorld: Anything else you want to add?

Answer: Guidelines can also be translated to Hindi for those who do not understand English.

Early online submission can be facilitated before had copy deadline.

Few more award categories can be added to the existing list. This step will inspire CR stations to bring more innovation in their programming.

  • Environment Awareness
  • Energy Conservation
  • Disaster Awareness
  • Health & Hygiene