Dear all: As I have been catching up on mails over the last few weeks about claiming credit and the legacy with which one wants to be identified, I recall wistfully that afternoon in Pastapur in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh about twelve years ago. It was a good five years after the historic Supreme Court judgement and the Bangalore Declaration. Many of us, including friends from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Canada, and Australia had arrived there after meeting for two days in Hyderabad about the need for community radio in India. We met some amazing women there, almost all of them dalit and many non-literate, with a resolve to have their voices heard over their own medium. The right to communicate, the need for articulation of local identities, participatory communication, gender empowerment, and self-representation -- the kind of concepts that were bandied about by the assembled academics and activists in highly sophisticated terms were echoed by these women much more coherently and sharply, drawn from decades of systematic silencing and marginalization. The Pastapur Initiative, a document that for the first time clearly demanded a third tier of broadcasting in India outside of the state and market, came out of such an inspiration.
It, of course, took the Government of India several years after that to announce a policy for community radio. More than a decade after that historic moment, where do we stand today? In spite of a general buzz about community radio in all kinds of circles and the emergence of a variety of actors (government departments, multilateral agencies, donors/funders, technology providers, capacity-builders, et al), the growth of the community radio sector in India has not been something in which we can feel genuine pride. Growth has been stunted by technological imperatives, huge costs of setting up, bureaucratic hurdles in licensing, the security blanket that's pulled over large swathes of our land, and unreasonable restrictions on content. Well-endowed and elite engineering colleges, agricultural and other universities, and KVKs have a fairly easy time with investments in radio stations by their respective institutions, while the real community space one was trying to carve out has been resounding to noises about financial sustainability, revenue generation, and online content platforms (if the recent Sammelan was anything to go by). I remember years ago, 'General' Narsamma saying to a co-panelist in Kathmandu, "You don't worry about how we will manage to keep the station going. You just give us the permission to start and we have confidence in the resilience and motivation of our communities to sustain it." As people involved in the community radio movement in various ways, let us worry about the kind of legacy we will leave behind. Unless we continue to work systematically for a complete democratization of the airwaves and put the community and that woman in the village eager to wield the microphone first, none of us have any right to claim any credit or legacy. We need to reinvoke the spirit of Pastapur and put the passion back in the CR movement. warmly, Vinod -- Dr. Vinod Pavarala Professor of Communication & UNESCO Chair on Community Media Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication University of Hyderabad Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500046 Phone: +91-40-23135501/23011553 http://tinyurl.com/dofcomm
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