IIT Bombay Unplugged with Campus Radio

IIT Bombay Unplugged with Campus Radio

Pankhuri Bajaj, Mar 21, 2009 1619 hrs IST

Students speak

Students at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) rolled-out their Web-based Campus Radio on Tuesday. With three shows gone by, it has mostly been a success - Rajat Chakravarty tells us, a third year aerospace engineering student at IIT Bombay, who is a major contributor to the project.

"The response to the Campus Radio has been good and bad," he says. While listeners enjoyed the variety of content like book reviews, travelogues, hasya kavi sammelan, a programme on trivia; technical glitches due to static was a put off, although there weren't any traffic problems.

One of the listeners who tuned in was Vivek Khandelwal, a third year student of Chemistry at IITB. He says, "I did listen to it, but for just close to 5 minutes. The idea is good. It was executed well. It in fact got some pretty decent traffic."

Along with Rajat, Sajjid Shariff, Rutika Muchhala, Aaditya Ramdas, and Palash Jhabak, among others create the 3 days a week shows for Campus Radio.

The idea to create a radio station for and by IITians sparked off two years ago. The original deliberation went into creating an FM radio frequency. However, that did not materialize due to licensing issues as well as other problems like permissions. Although this time, within only six weeks of research and planning, and with approximately Rs. 8,000 worth of professional equipment and software, the IIT Campus Radio was set rolling.

In the six weeks involved in its inception, the students learnt about the nuances of Web radio, carried out feasibility and sustainability studies, demographics research, as well as prepared the structure of the content.

"Through the research we carried out across IITB, we learnt that 60% of the population wanted the content to be hosted in Hindi, and the 40% in English. Students and other residents come to IIT from across the country which includes rural areas where people aren't very comfortable with English language. Hence, majority of content in the shows is in Hindi," Chakravarty informs.

Center of Distance Engineering Education Programme, or CDEEP, has been the core for airing Campus Radio. Technical head of CDEEP, Rahul Deshmukh, along with dean Prakash Gopalan, cultural chairman T. Kundu have made Campus Radio a possibility.

For your information, CDEEP offers Live Webcast Courses for science and engineering students across India.

While the Campus Radio people haven't been able to quantify the number of people that have logged in so far, Chakravarty tells us that the number could be close to 1000 - which is a decent start. IITB's population - that includes students, faculty, and other employees - is around 10,000.

The story's over, but what is Web radio?

Unlike your regular radio service that is broadcast through radio waves on to your receiving device - what we call a radio, Web radio, as the name suggests, is an audio broadcasting service transmitted via the Internet.