- A volunteer radio station established by environmental nonprofits and staffed by local community members is bringing news and entertainment to villages around Bukit Rimbang Baling Wildlife Sanctuary, a Sumatran tiger habitat in Indonesia’s Riau province.
- Young volunteers at the station interned at a radio station on Java Island, where they learned to broadcast and repair transmitters in the remote Sumatran forest, which is inaccessible by road and has almost no cellphone service.
- The radio station offers a means for young people in disparate communities to share ideas and information on the economy and environment.
KAMPAR, Indonesia — The information from Radio Komunitas Lintas Subayang 107.7 FM reaches the remote corners of the Sumatran forest from a small broadcasting house in a market.
“Accessing telecoms and disseminating information used to be a challenge,” said Agustinus Wijayanto, the director of a tiger conservation program in Indonesia’s Riau province.
But that began to change a decade ago after conservation officials, together with WWF and Yapeka, an Indigenous people’s nonprofit, began work on a means of reaching people living within this protected forest in an upland pocket of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
In 2014, the government zoned off 141,226 hectares (348,977 acres) of forest in Riau province for Bukit Rimbang Baling Wildlife Sanctuary, protecting one of the few remaining habitats of the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) in the upland of Riau’s Kampar district.
Tiger subspecies endemic to the Indonesian islands of Java (Panthera tigris sondaica) and Bali (Panthera tigris balica) were both declared extinct during the 20th century as forests on those islands dwindled.
In 2017, the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, declared the Sumatran tiger critically endangered, following decades of killings on Indonesia’s main western island.
The Indigenous people living in the area are largely cut off from society in Riau province, with cellphone reception only available in a handful of more than a dozen communities.
Relay information
Rakom Lintas Subayang, as the station is known, broadcasts a mix of entertainment and public information, including potentially lifesaving information on disaster risk, such as when the water level in the river threatens communities downstream.
“That’s of benefit for the people who live further down,” said M. Yatim, the station’s founding director.
The station also broadcasts important information on forest conservation, a subject tied to the fate of the few tigers that continue to roam Bukit Rimbang Baling Wildlife Sanctuary.
More than a dozen small villages in the sanctuary are located within the administrative jurisdiction of Kampar district. However, the remote access to the villages means many here consider infrastructure threadbare and government assistance to be distant.
Absence of a viable phone signal was the main impetus to establish a radio station, Agustinus said.
Yapeka, the Indigenous foundation, donated the hardware and trained locals to operate the equipment and make necessary repairs.
The foundation called on established broadcasters from Rakom Lintas Merapi, a radio station in Central Java province, to help the local volunteers get up to speed.
“Several of the Rakom Lintas Subayang operators interned at Rakom Lintas Merapi,” Agustinus said. “After they came back, they shared their experiences and knowledge with the others.”
This provided a platform for young people like Indra Rius from Tanjung Belit, one of more than a dozen villages within the forest reserve. Indra became one of the first people trained as a technician. He also broadcasts a radio program that mixes music with a phone-in segment.
Agustinus said the vision for Rakom Lintas Subayang was a public service broadcaster reflecting information for Indigenous communities who produced no media of their own. “Not just on conservation, but also [covering] society and the economy,” he said.
Rakom Lintas Subayang broadcasts a blend of public information from village administrators and promotional spots for local businesses, most of which sell homemade snacks like fried banana chips.
“We ask for the cellphone number and the name of the shop, then we announce it on the radio during the broadcast schedule,” Indra said.
Wide receivers
Radio stations emerged as an increasingly important source of information for Indigenous peoples around the world in the latter half of the 20th century.
In the 1970s, the government of Mexico began establishing radio stations in Indigenous languages. In 1980, 8KIN became the first Aboriginal radio station in Australia (there are more than 120 operating today).
However, forested areas are a hostile environment for electrical equipment, a problem familiar to operators of bioacoustic research and conservation cameras traps as well as Indigenous radio stations.
Rakom Lintas Subayang faced problems from aging transmitters, which curtailed the maximum range of broadcast into the forest. Transmission towers in some villages stopped functioning. In some communities, the airwaves fell silent.
These headwinds reflected the economic and social realities on the ground where many young people who originally trained in broadcasting have since migrated for work in urban areas to support their families.
Out of around 30 people trained to operate Rakom Lintas Subayang, only a few continued to be able to contribute on a part-time basis.
In response to the aging hardware and challenges retaining volunteers, Yapeka began collaborating with Green Radio Line, a station in the provincial capital, Pekanbaru, to pivot to digital radio and help recruit new producers.
The partnership with Green Radio Line also prompted young people from the forest traveling to high schools in the provincial capital to present to students on the importance of the radio station.
Rakom Lintas Subayang is now broadcast out of a new studio, and can be streamed online on platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
The new digital broadcast has widened the reach of Rakom Lintas Subayang, giving young Indigenous people a voice in the social and economic changes taking place around them.
“Our hope is that young people around Rimbang Baling have the same rights as urban children,” said Green Radio Line founder Sari Indriaty. “So they aren’t only the subjects of news, but that they can produce their own information.”
Banner image: A captive Sumatran tiger. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
This story was first published here in Indonesian on Jan. 26, 2025.
Camera traps reveal little-known Sumatran tiger forests need better protection
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