[From: sajan venniyoor <[email protected]> To: CR India <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, 20 September, 2009 22:39:00 Subject: [cr-india] ‘Community radio needs more support’
‘Community radio needs more support’ Business Line, 19 Sept 2009 Madurai, Sept. 18 Community radio broadcasting in India needs an enabling environment, according to Mr Ashish Sen....The broadcast spectrum in the country has the potential for 5,000 stations of 50 Watt capacity each. ] Where did Ashish get this ridiculous figure? It is perilously close to the 4,000 number that some uninformed minister blabbed in a press conference six or seven years ago, when she first invented community radio a la Popov. It is very sad that AMARC effectively endorses this position through public statements of the kind. We can extrapolate from my calculation in response, for the true FM capacity of the country, which worked out to over 900,000 stations of ~5W*, reaching a pragmatic zone of about 5 km in dia each, to adjust for 50W stations, which will reach a zone of about ~25 km in dia. This is 25 times the effective area of reach of 5W stations, hence we must cut down the total to 1/25th, or 4%. That is still 36,000 stations, give or take a few hundreds. This willingness by the 'haves' of our country to accept lower targets of accomplishment devils every single reasonable attempt being made in the country to get the ordinary people, the disenfranchised and exploited, chances to pull themselves together to reach the basest level of empowerment: a voice. Put this together with the divisiveness between commercial and non-commercial, and educational and 'broader' purpose objectives, and the situation gets much worse vitiated. Arguments that give more to the 'haves' in terms of super-powerful transmission capacities, which cruelly cut down the options for those in more straitened circumstances, effectively reducing every need in the country to an economic need, and transforming the government's main purpose from governance to revenue collection, are a travesty. While I do not have anything against some stations being more powerful, for those few places in the country that have low population density in high-foliage (or other high-attenuation causes) geographies, to take it as the norm is simply a waste of a fantastic resource, simply because it is there. I find the constant arguments on the CR India list between education and community exceedingly irritating, and we haven't even got down to discussing the justification for commercial stations to get 1. tsunami transmitters that drown out all less expensive options in the vicinity and 2. fixed frequencies across the country [that achieve what? branding by frequency? How many of these commercial chains still rely on frequency branding to promote their channels, and how is it in the nation's interest to lower their costs of advertising in national newspapers? because of course it does not affect the cost of advertising in local media]. [*I had originally assumed about 100 channels per fixed area, resulting in 1.25 million stations for the country, but after discussions with practiced US broadcasters, reduced this number to 72. Accordingly the 1.25 million got cut down by 25%, which I had subsequently posted to the list] Vickram http://communicall.wordpress.com http://vvcrishna.wordpress.com
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