Gram Vaani Community Media

Gram Vaani, meaning 'voice of the village', is a social technology company incubated out of IIT Delhi. We started in 2009 with the intent of reversing the flow of information, that is, to make it bottom-up instead of top-down. Using simple technologies and social context to design tools, we have been able to impact communities at large - more than 2 million users in over 7 Indian States, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Namibia and South Africa. More interesting than this are the outcomes of what we have done: Forty rural radio stations are able to manage and share content over mobiles and the web, corrupt ration shop officials in Jharkhand were arrested due to citizen complaints made on our platform, Women Sarpanches in Uttar Pradesh shared learning and opinions on their work with senior government officials, and citizens were able to monitor and report on waste management in 18 wards of Delhi to hold MCD officials accountable for their work.

Gram Vaani has won several awards, including:

• The Knight News Challenge in 2008
• The Manthan Awards in 2009
• The Economic Times Power of Ideas awards in 2010
• The Rising Stars in Global Health award in 2012
• The mBillionth Award South Asia in 2012 and 2013

Mobile Vaani

Going forward, we are bringing together our footprint on radio-over-phone and community radio services across the country, to build a unified platform of social media for the bottom of the pyramid. We call this Mobile Vaani. Mobile Vaani is our answer to building a social media platform equivalent to Facebook/YouTube/Twitter for rural areas. We have built an intelligent IVR (interactive voice response) system that allows people to call into a number and leave a message about their community, or listen to messages left by others. These messages range from updates about local village events, to folk songs and cultural updates from the communities, feedback on government schemes, and discussions about topics of importance including the state of education and health in rural areas. Being purely voice based, Mobile Vaani immediately becomes accessible to poorly literate communities. With a combination of applications running on the platform including social networking, citizen journalism, social messaging, and local governance, our goal is to scale the Mobile Vaani network across the entire country.

Our flagship deployment in Jharkhand now has over 100,000 users that call over 3000 times per day, and discuss wide ranging issues on culture, local updates and announcements, government schemes, and information sharing.

vAutomate

For five years we’ve been in the field working with community voices. In that time we’ve built several tools to change the way information flows from rural and marginalized communities. Most of these work through voice prompts on simple phones, which plug in to a more sophisticated web-based dashboard that controls inputs. We call this toolkit vAutomate to help partner automate their field operations.

Voice-based helplines are the simplest way to structure community inputs. By introducing features like commenting, user rating, and peer-to-peer sharing, we have been able to develop several sophisticated variations of the traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response systems, which are phone-based menus). We have packaged these as the vAutomate toolkit. These services are available stand-alone, or integrated with our Mobile Vaani voice communication platform. All applications in Gram Vaani’s vAutomate toolkit feature:

• Simple web-based interface supporting multiple account logins, with full moderation over content available to administrative users
• Calls can be served over landlines or SIM cards, increasing portability
• Low hardware requirements reduce costs of operation and maintenance
• Services can be open to all, or locked to allow only approved numbers

GRINS

GRINS (Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System) is an integrated software solution for running a community radio station that allows program scheduling and play-out, full telephony and SMS integration, Internet streaming, content management and statistical analysis of play-out history. This helps community radio stations manage complex station management tasks in an easy and error-free manner. Its greatest feature? As the most popular low-cost radio management solution, it touches 2.5 million listeners in over 6 countries.

Stations have used GRINS to do live broadcasts of NREGA (Rural Employment Guarantee scheme) and Panchayat meetings. Schools have played Antakshari over the phone and broadcast it on radio, via GRINS. A station has even run a reality show on folk music similar to Indian Idol, and used GRINS to track votes by listeners. Other stations have used the IVR (phone-based menu) feature of GRINS to record answers to quizzes, comments on problems with NREGA and PDS, anonymous reporting of events, and other purposes.

External links

• Gram Vaani