By Frederick Noronha, IANS
Hyderabad : Years before India opened its policy in late 2006 and allowed community radio stations to be set up, a handful of experimental community radios tried to give space on the airwaves to alternative voices .
“Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India”, a book written by two University of Hyderabad scholars — Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan K. Malik, and published by Sage — documents four major community radio initiatives in India that have been a tool for “empowerment at the grassroots” for eight years.
Community radio is a type of radio service that caters to the interests of a certain area, broadcasting material that is popular with a local audience but is overlooked by the mainstream media.
These initiatives are the Deccan Development Society (DDS) run by Dalit women and others in Medak in Andhra Pradesh, the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in the Kutchi language in Gujarat, the Nammadhwani project in the Kolar district of Karnataka, and the “Challa Ho Gaon Mein” programme in Jharkhand.
In an age where the media trend has been towards mergers, acquisitions and concentration of ownership, these examples show that community-based radio has a future in a diverse country like India, the book suggests.
“All these people had come up with creative ways to do audio production in the absence of the right to broadcast themselves. Nammadhwani did it with cable radio, sending out image-less radio signals through cable TV, while DDS did it with narrowcasting or distributing recorded tapes,” Pavarala said.
“Importantly, these are mainly non-literate rural communities. We also looked at the ways in which their listeners have responded to the programmes,” Pavarala told IANS.
“These were communities whose issues and problems rarely got reflected in the mainstream media, and they found these alternative media outlets ideal to highlight their local problems, to articulate local identities, in their own languages,” adds Pavarala.
He added that in a country “where language changes every few kilometres”, the projects they studied showed that radio done by people in their own language could be an effective tool for addressing the problems of development.
“In Jharkhand, when we asked some listeners why they didn’t listen to All India Radio (AIR), Ranchi, one man said, ‘Woh Hindi humko Angrezi lagta hai’ (Their Hindi sounds as alien as English to us)! It only shows how deep the linguistic identities run in our country,” said Pavarala.
Pavarala said state-run AIR also tried its own experiments with local radio much earlier.
“State-run radio stations like the ones at Nagercoil or Hospet in Karnataka were there. With good intentions and good station managers.”
“But they failed. They were wound up very soon, partly because this kind of participatory mode of radio programming didn’t work with them. You can’t knock on people’s doors and suddenly say you make radio programmes on your own,” he said.
Some of the NGOs they studied, like the Medak-based DDS, have worked in the area for the last 15 years on issues of land, food security, biodiversity, water, gender equality and issues of survival, he said.
“They ask ‘why can’t we tell our own stories through our own eyes. Why should others tell our stories, second-hand?’,” said Pavarala.
He pointed out how access to radio had its impact on the status of women in the area.
“Some asked questions like, ‘We don’t even have food to eat. Can radio give us food to eat?’ Radio might not give you food, but it might give you a voice to ask for it. Bread versus radio is a bit unfair question. People need both, and perhaps one is even linked to the other,” said Pavarala.