BROOKE GLADSTONE: Television is rarely seen in the far reaches of Gujarat, a state in western India; and rarer still in an impoverished desert region there called Kutch where villagers may trek miles to find the day's water. Twice the size of New Jersey and sparsely populated, Kutch is isolated from the rest of India largely because it shares a porous border with India's bitter rival, Pakistan. TV's may be unaffordable, but every Kutchi village has a radio. From Gujarat, reporter Miranda Kennedy has the story. [MUSIC]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: This is the music that calls villagers from the field every Sunday evening to gather around the village radio at a tea stall here in the barren terrain of Kutch. Radio Ujjas is how it's known to locals. [WOMAN SINGING UP FOR A MOMENT] The people here speak a dialect called Kutchi which has no written script. Most Kutchis live their lives without needing to write more than their name. They work as farmers, laborers, fishermen or housewives. The literacy rate among women is lower than 1 percent in some parts of the region. [GROUP SINGING UP FOR A MOMENT] It is these statistics that gave the grass roots women's group Kutch Vikas Mahila Sangathan or KVMS the idea of a radio show. KVMS joined together with a group of media professionals, bought air time from the state-owned radio which has an almost complete monopoly over India's air waves and taught themselves the in's and out's of producing radio. Preeti Soni grew up in a Kutchi village. She is now the producer of Radio Ujjas. [PREETI SONI SPEAKING IN KUTCHI LANGUAGE]

TRANSLATOR FOR PREETI SONI: All India radio has only one program in our language, so we wanted to create something that villagers could understand and relate to. We had no model to look to anywhere in India. The villages in Kutch are hundreds of kilometers apart. We wanted to link them and talk about real issues that people face but that they don't talk about in the open. [PREETI SONI SPEAKING IN KUTCHI LANGUAGE]

TRANSLATOR FOR PREETI SONI: It began as a serialized weekly radio soap opera that drew heavily on Kutchi folklore. Its main star was a Siberian crane, popular in Kutchi mythology with a bird's eye view over the thousand-some villages over the region. Stalin K is one of the founders of Radio Ujjas. He works with the Drishi Media Collective, a group of media professionals based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city. He says one of the greatest challenges of the project was finding ways to get unorthodox ideas across to a highly traditional village audience.

STALIN K: The first program was not overly radical because of certain ground rules being laid down. One, it is going to take a feminist stance, but never alienate the men. You have characters who are rebellious, but they can't be completely misplaced and unidentifiable. So the radical thing for example in, in Kunjal, one of the radical things was that there is this woman's head of the council whose daughter has decided that she'll not get married. Now that's radical.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: After three years, the project has transformed into a vibrant weekly magazine. The show still has a dramatized serial, but now it's followed by an investigative reporting section and a travelogue that explores Kutchi history and arts. [FOLK MUSIC SLOWLY UP AND UNDER] The segments are linked by indigenous folk songs sung by local musicians. It's the first broadcast to ever reach every corner of the region, and almost two thirds of the Kutchi population now tunes in to the program. The chief aim of Radio Ujjas is teaching media skills to villagers, particularly women. For the investigative expose section, the group recruited 15 reporters from Kutchi villages and taught them basic journalism. Most are school dropouts in their early 20s. Half of the reporters are women. Nimmi Chauhan of the Drishti Media Collective explains.

NIMMI CHAUHAN: We wanted the local people to be able to do it themselves. They should not keep on relying on us all the time. Whatever we have, we should part the skills to them so that they can further in, in turn part it to somebody else. And that's how truly you can become community radio.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: The most popular segment on Radio Ujjas is the muckraking investigative expose. The segment name, Parda Faash, literally means lifting the veil. The Radio Ujjas reporters share 2 minidisk recorders which they take into the field to conduct interviews. They have learned how to work with digital editing software which is installed in their studio in Bhug, the capital of Kutch. Every week they meet with a KVMS editorial committee to come up with what to cover. Dozens of village problems have been solved after they were made public on Radio Ujjas. Batti Ahmat Bacchu is a 52-year-old fisherman who, along with hundreds of other fishermen, was being evicted from his district by a port expansion project. The company forbade them to fish or live in the area. Bacchu, like many tribal villagers in India, occupies land that has been in his family for generations but for which he holds no deed. [BATTI AHMAT BACCHU SPEAKING IN KUTCHI LANGUAGE]

TRANSLATOR FOR BATTI AHMAT BACCHU: They asked us to vacate lock, stock and barrel without any proper resettlement and compensation. Where could we go aside from another seashore, since we are fishermen? When we filed a case for wrongful eviction, they fabricated charges against us, but it is not their land. Though we don't have any proof of its ownership, we have been living there for centuries. There was no one to hear our grievances, so the radio program was a godsend for us. [BATTI AHMAT BACCHU SPEAKING AGAIN, FADES]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Bacchu went on a hunger fast and refused to vacate the land, but no one paid him any mind until a Radio Ujjas reporter got wind of the story and put Bacchu on the air. KVMS helped Bacchu take his case to court and the company was forced to come up with alternative resettlement plans for the fishermen. For many villagers, the radio project has also brought personal transformation. [RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI SPEAKING IN KUTCHI LANGUAGE]

TRANSLATOR FOR RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI: When I heard the program, it helped me become aware and made me think that radio is a good way to try to find some justice. [RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI SPEAKING AGAIN, FADES]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Rahimaben Salimbhai is a reporter in Mundra village. She went to school until she was 14. Now, at age 37, she is the oldest reporter in the group. She is also one of the rare Kutchi village women who separated from her husband, which she did only recently after getting involved with KVMS. Because her husband has a problem with alcohol, she decided to investigate alcoholism and abuse in Kutch. [RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI SPEAKING AGAIN, FADES]

TRANSLATOR FOR RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI: Many women came together for a meeting in my village, and I interviewed them about the menace of liquor that the village is facing. Some 20 women agreed to speak to me about how the men drink away their money. Then the women unanimously appealed to the village head to stop the flow of liquor in the village. [RAHIMABEN SALIMBHAI SPEAKING AGAIN, FADES]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Two years ago, an earthquake ravaged the region, killing almost 20,000 people. Virtually every building in Kutch was damaged, including the radio studio in Bhug. But widespread corruption and neglect have prevented most of the houses from being rebuilt. A few months after the quake, Radio Ujjas started airing an earthquake relief information program after convincing an electronics company to donate a thousand radios to Kutchi villagers. The program was called You Are Alive. Preeti Soni, producer of Radio Ujjas. [PREETI SONI SPEAKING IN KUTCHI LANGUAGE]

TRANSLATOR FOR PREETI SONI: You can really see the program's impact in the village of Sirani Vand. There, the village head and a bank official joined hands to deduct money from every Kutchi's compensation for the houses they lost in the earthquake. They collected hundreds of thousands of rupees for themselves that way. We exposed it on the air, forcing the village head to apologize and return the money. When we do this kind of exposing, it's really uplifting for the villagers, because they see that there is a way to make their voices heard and deal with their problems. [PREETI SONI SPEAKING AGAIN, FADES]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Radio Ujjas has gained such a reputation that sometimes when a reporter starts sniffing around a village, the problem will be cleared up before she can even come back to report on it. The word "ujjas" means "light" in Kutchi. The Radio Ujjas project is inspiring other nascent community radio projects cropping up around rural India. [RADIO UJJAS MUSIC UP & UNDER] For On the Media, I'm Miranda Kennedy in Kutch, Gujarat. [MUSIC CONTINUES, FADES UNDER]