The problem is more often with the regulatory framework, especially in South Asia, which restricts many ICTs, makes licenses and imports prohibitively expensive, over-regulates the spectrum, and bans many applications.

Radio Alakal – a new wave of hope
The seas off the fishing beach of Poonthura in South Kerala are calm at sunrise as the fishermen bring in their night's catch. Fisher folk line the beach as the boats come in, dealers in bright lungis and crisp shirts, women with large fish baskets lined with crushed ice, children darting through the crowd … the atmosphere is almost festive. Just over 16 months ago, the seas had raged over the sands, destroying huts and boats, killing men, women and children along the Kerala coast as the Tsunami of 24 December 2004 struck without warning.

This calm summer morning, early in May 2006, two young people from the fishing community – Stalin and Leo Das – struggle up the beach road with a CD player and loud-speakers. They set this up at a kiosk on the beach by the fish landing centre. Soon there is a crackle and hiss, and a voice announces the programmes of Radio Alakal ('waves'). Over the next hour, the occasionally attentive crowd is treated to a medley of music, weather updates and local information. Radio Alakal has been 'on air' since 1 May 2006, and it is a community radio station in every respect except one: it has no station and no license to broadcast. Radio Alakal is 'narrowcast' over loud-speakers from four fish landing centres around Trivandrum, and does not reach a vital slice of its target audience – the fishermen out at sea, who need weather updates and storm warnings, information on fish location and fish prices, all of which could be easily delivered to them over low power FM radio.

Regulatory exercises
India is not the only country in South Asia which does not permit communities to own and operate radio stations. At the GKP International Forum on Cross-Sector Partnerships in Colombo, Sri Lanka (8-9 May 2006), I met ICT experts and media persons from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Thailand, Kenya and a host of developing nations who cited the lack of an enabling regulatory framework for ICTs as one of the main stumbling blocks to the use of ICT for development.  AHM Bazlur Rahman, of the Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication (BNNRC) spoke of the use of ICT in disaster related relief and reconstruction efforts, and bemoaned the lack of coastal community radio stations to prepare for and warn against the periodic cyclones that ravage the Bangladesh coast. Like many groups in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal, the BNNRC has been lobbying for a CR policy for many years, without much success.

In Pakistan, the regulatory body PEMRA was quick to issue emergency area non-commercial FM radio licenses in the aftermath of the 8 October 2005 earthquake. But, as Internews' Annual State of Media in Pakistan 2005-06 report says, "PEMRA is yet to come out with a real community radio station definition and policy". And for every legal FM radio station in Pakistan, there are at least three times as many illegal ones, mostly in the North West Frontier Province.

Run by local religious leaders and their followers, these 'pirate' stations are a serious threat to peace – over 25 people died in bloody clashes over radio broadcasts by sectarian groups in Bara, a tribal area – and the government finally raided and closed down 156 unlicensed stations by July 2006. But the technology is so cheap and accessible that many of the stations are back on air within days of being shut down. It could fairly be said that if radio is outlawed, only outlaws will have radio.


Radio Alakal, Kerala

Discouraging trends
At the GKP Forum, I put this to Matt Abud of Internews, who has worked with radio stations in troubled regions like Afghanistan and Aceh, Indonesia. He admitted that Afghanistan didn't have a clear-cut community radio policy yet, but the country had a vibrant community radio movement.

In Aceh, Afghanistan or Pakistan, in natural or man-made calamities, radio becomes the prime source of information for communities. Radio, said Matt, has a very particular relationship, especially with rural communities It is cheap to produce, cheap to receive and cheap to participate in.

As Namrata Bali of SEWA (Self Employed Women's Association) said, "The poor do not have the luxury of walking two or three miles to access information". Namrata had earlier taken part in the BBC's 'Digital Dividend' debate, where the issue of using appropriate rather than cutting-edge ICTs came up. In a segment on radio, the BBC had a particularly telling comment: "There are a billion transistor radios in the world. For the 50 percent of the world's population who have never made a phone call, radio is the information highway. Radio is accessible and cheap in the remotest areas. The question is: that while there is so much preoccupation with the Internet, mobile phones and so forth, is there a case to be made for putting more resources into technologies like clockwork radio that directly benefit the poor?" In Sri Lanka itself, there is a great rush to establish a nation-wide network of ICT service delivery centres called 'Nenasalas', to bring computers and broadband to the people. But, to paraphrase Namrata Bali, even walking two miles to a Nenasala could be a luxury for the poor. How about bringing the benefits of ICT to the doorsteps of the deprived?

eTukTuk– the Sri Lankan experience
Up in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, near Kandy, I came across an amazing experiment in taking the fruits of ICT directly to the poor. The eTukTuk project is part of the Kothmale Community Radio station and Multi-media Centre. A cursory look at the eTukTuk and one would be tempted to dismiss it as just another Bajaj autorickshaw that's as common in Sri Lanka as coconut palms. But this is no ordinary three-wheeler: inside the tuktuk is a complete radio-station and telecentre – with computer, printer, scanner, digital camera and Internet connection.

The eTukTuk is the most accessible of telecentres – it putters along the dirt roads of Kothmale, travelling to distant villages, bringing the benefits of ICTs to the homes of the people.

But how about the 'mobile' radio station within the tuktuk? As I assured Ben Grubb, the young Australian who oversees the eTukTuk project, a mobile radio transmitter being carted around the countryside would cause most regulatory authorities in South Asia to go ballistic. Ben grinned. "Well, the Kothmale CR is run by SLBC (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation), so I guess it is legal here."

There lies the rub. Kothmale CR has been around since
1989, but – in the absence of a proper community radio policy - it has yet to be replicated. In the GKP panel on ICTs for Peace, Sanjana Hattotuwa of InfoShare called such projects 'pilots without wings'. That is, pilot projects that 'look wonderful as long as the funding lasts,' but which are essentially unsustainable and unreplicable.


e-TukTuk, Sri Lanka

Observations
Without a doubt, the knowledge revolution - through ICTs and rural knowledge centres - is the most significant movement of the early years of this century. M. S. Swaminathan of MSSRF spoke of his Mission 2007, to turn every village into a knowledge centre.

The 'father' of the Green Revolution in India said, "An old woman told me that the Green Revolution was important, it has increased productivity of crops like wheat, or rice or corn, but the knowledge revolution through the village knowledge centre has affected their entire lives, whether it is health or education or livelihood, so that the knowledge revolution has become the backbone of the rural livelihood security system."

The biggest stumbling to realising this dream is not so much the technology, which – by an extension of Moore's law – becomes twice as efficient and twice as cheap every other year. The problem is more often with the regulatory framework, especially in South Asia, which restricts many ICTs, makes licenses and imports prohibitively expensive, over-regulates the spectrum, and bans many applications.

At one of the GKP Open Space discussions on policy and regulatory framework for ICTs ('what can governments do to minimise digital inequality?'), Daan Boom, Principal Knowledge Management Specialist, Asian Development Bank sat with a group of disgruntled South Asian ICT activists, and was clearly taken aback by the torrent of laments about restrictive government policy on ICTs. "I seem to have touched a raw nerve," he commented.

Around the table sat Indians, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, two Africans and a Taiwanese, all berating their particular governments. It was a Kodak moment. The fight is far from over and the battle-ground is half the world. g