Disaster risk reduction involves preparedness before such events, response and recovery during and after such events. Prevention deals with long term planning and follow-up. All these steps need facilitation of information and communication among the communities and with other stakeholders. The following factors determine the success of any disaster risk reduction strategy, where communication plays a key role:

• Organising the communities to plan, implement and monitor the disaster management strategies.
• Facilitating relief, rehabilitation and restoration initiatives.
• Advocating appropriate technology for prevention and rehabilitation.
• Building capacity of the local communities to cope up with the disasters.

Community radio can play a vital role in achieving the above strategies. Since this is perceived to be an enabling tool for building capacities of the local communities to own and manage it, this would serve their information and communication needs in a sustainable manner. Community radio combined with the village information centres could help a lot in creating location specific disaster mitigation strategies.

Tanks are the lifelines of the rural TamilNadu. Kottampatti block falls under the Palar kottakaraiar basin with 967 tanks. Drought and flood are the recurring phenomenon in this block. In 2005, this block faced a severe flood damage, where many number of tanks were breached and people faced a lots of damages. The relief and rehabilitation initiatives by the Vayalagam Tankfed Agriculture Development Programme of DHAN have brought in a lot of lessons to mitigate such events in the future. Information and communication were the vital inputs along with the relief and rehabilitation measures came out of the flood relief project done with the support of Oxfam Novib that time. On this background the present proposal has been conceived to create a locally owned and managed communication media to cope up with such disasters.

• Building a sustainable model of community owned communication media that would enable them to mitigate and manage disasters of any kind.
• Supporting the community led conservation initiatives that have the potential of mitigating droughts and moderating floods by involving them in production and dissemination of radio programmes around these aspects.

• Community structure and processes for managing the Community Radio with mechanisms for running the station in a sustainable manner.
• Radio programmes on best practices and new initiatives in drought and flood mitigation strategies adopted by the communities.
• A pool of trained community reporters for managing production and dissemination.