Experts ask media to boost Community Radio Movement

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Have you ever heard anybody calling radio an 'Idiot Box'? Never. Yet Radio experience in India has mostly been from gigantic broadcasting house, All India Radio. The recently emerged FM radios are only cosmetic boredom, like TVs, to the concept of development of grassroots of population. The conference on 'Community Radio : Practices and Possibilities' at Indira Gandhi National Open University recently discussed a plethora of issues dogging the grassroots and lamented the current state of Indian community radio (CR) movement started way back in 1951 during India's initial Plan years.

Indian Media drew most flak for ignoring a movement very core in the concept of democracy and development of a nation. They should have prioritized the CR movement and its processes of how to create awareness among umpteen communities about their rights, opportunities, vocational expertise, knowledge and the need to avail themselves of these. They should have concertedly raised region and issue-specific CRs addressing target communities, with a view to improving their living condition. Instead, what the post-Independent Indian media did was far removed from the necessity of development journalism, was what ired the speakers in the conference.

The Government Policy of Community Radio, 2002 promised to set up over 4,000 CRs, but till date India only set up 45, that too mostly in public sector. Compare this with its 35-year-old neighbour – Bangladesh' feat. It already charted 140 CRs to boast of. The Bangladesh Government officially adopted a CR policy only in 2008, in response to the World bank vision for "a world free of poverty".

Former Information Commissioner Dr OP Kejariwal stressed, "Though our generation speaks of globalization, we rather need more focus on glocalisation. So along with broadcasting, we need narrowcasting. If we adapt modern broadcast technologies for local broadcasts, we have community radio, where we have communities participating not only as broadcasters but as listeners too."

Lauding the efforts of the School, Vice Chancellor Professor V N Rajasekharan Pillai said, "Community Radio programme is a new tool for information dissemination at the grassroots level. It fits well in the IGNOU's larger aim of improving the quality of life of the masses. It's probable that Community Radios go on to revolusionise not only developing countries, but also the developed nations where underprivileged and marginalized communities still exist."

Former director of IGNOU's nerve centre Electronic Media Production Centre (EMPC), Dr R Sreedhar, who currently is Director of Commonwealth Educational Media Centre in Asia (CEMCA), identified the basic problems in development of CRs in India. He said, "The lack of media literacy, training and professionalism have been basic hurdles in disseminating awareness programmes of the Community Radio." Dr Sreedhar also explained how easy is it to generate fund for making the CRs self-sufficient, even without any outside funding.

Suman Basnet, South Asian regional director of World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters or Associacion Mundial De Radio Comunitarias (AMARC) narrated highlights of evolution of CR and said, "India is the first country in South Asia to have an independent CR policy. Miracles of community radio broadcasting are just waiting to happen." A conglomerate of over 4,000 community radios in 115 countries, AMARC is only eager to hand-hold genuine Indian efforts to solidify the CR movement in South Asia.

The conference was actively participated by a large number of activists, who came from across the country and were vibrant about the movement. Following what UNDP Regional Communication Adviser Mrs Surekha Suberwal hoped for growth of the medium, the conference endedwith a number of recommendations as under :

The Community Radio functionaries have to adopt enabling policies for relevant interactive sustainable CRs to empower communities.

For that, they should disseminate community-specific education through their CRs.
State legal authorities must help in spreading awareness.

State funding apart, CRs must be able to generate funds within the ambit of functions. Funding also will be available from UNDP, AMARC, CEMCA.

The functionaries must accommodate and educate future trained hands for running and owning CRs, for which CEMCA has already announced 150 annual scholarship for capable students of IGNOU's Certificate Programme in CR.

There cannot be One solution to deal with issues, nor One uniform code for all communities.
Local knowledge, geographical indication in health products, herbals medicines, must be promoted through CRs.