UK enhancing Radio Monsoon for Indian fishermen

LONDON: A team of UK experts are working on enhancing the reach of a radio service to help fishers in India's southern Malabar Coast make more accurate and accessible marine weather forecasts, which would help save many lives in the region.

Radio Monsoon, an outcome of University of Sussex's Sustainability Research Programme, is hoping to graduate from a station operating on a shoestring budget to a fullyequipped studio this year.

It is designed to ensure safer working conditions for the thousands of fishing families in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

The university team, led by anthropologist professor Filippo Osella, involved geographer Dr Max Martin working with artisanal fishers in Thiruvananthapuram, to convert their small tech experiment into a weather knowledge co-production tool.

Martin lived in the fishing villages, conducting interviews, holding focus groups, and tracking boats, and realised that the fishers are the best people to learn from in order to improve forecasting.

"We found that there is often a gap between what marine weather forecasters provide and artisanal fishers accept as useful information to decide whether or not to go to fish. To fill this gap, the forecasters need to listen to the fishers," Martin said.

He concluded that forecast dissemination needed to be easily accessible in local languages to the last mile through different media, as well as precise, clear, timely and locally relevant and actionable.