SEWA has observed that many of its members avidly listen to the radio while they work, be it bidi rolling, incense stick making, stitching or weaving. The combination of low cost and wide reach makes radio an ideal medium of communication in developing countries. While the print medium requires literacy skills, the electronic medium requires computer skills, and the video/television medium requires a television, which is quite expensive, SEWA Radio's research has shown that the medium of radio is an untapped source of education and communication to even the remotest of villages in India.

In April of 2005, SEWA began its first community radio program, entitled Rudi no Radio (Rudi’s Radio), a weekly 15-minute program produced and broadcast by employees of SEWA for a rural audience. In each episode, Rudiben is informally sitting and talking with local members of her village about things that affect them as women and as laborers. The program is symbolically named after our first member of SEWA who worked to spread our association’s wings to rural areas. In that spirit, the program extends to the Ahmedabad-Vadodara area on All India Radio-Ahmedabad (AIR-Ahm.) airwaves, and gauging from listener response, we estimate that 500,000 listeners are tuning in weekly for the show.

The way our program is set up now, Rudi no Radio has completed its program of 120 episodes on AIR-Ahm.’s airwaves. And because of our program’s positive listener response, SEWA Radio renewed its contract with AIR to continue bringing Rudi no Radio to rural women. Each show has its own topic. For example, some of the topics we’ve covered so far include: nutrition, the importance of attaining insurance, summer diseases and prevention and water harvesting methods, just to name a few.

For one of our shows, entitled Women’s Power, Jotikaben from the village of Bayad came to Ahmedabad to talk in the show about how women in her village took it upon themselves to fix broken hand pumps when the men refused to. Now that the men have seen it done, and much more, done by their very own wives, Jotikaben says that their husbands are more willing to listen to the women now than they were before. To bring to the forefront more women like Jotikaben and her friends, we plan to both increase the communication between SEWA Radio and listeners, as well as extend our air time to bring information of greater impact to the same rural sectors of Gujarat.