Sajan Venniyoor Doordarshan, New Delhi venniyoor@rediffmail.com

Amidst media reports that India’s new community radio policy is on the verge of being sent for Cabinet approval, there are slight fears among community radio groups that the policy may not quite live up to their expectations.

Amidst media reports that India’s new community radio policy is on the verge of being sent for Cabinet approval, the final stage of policy making, there are slight fears among community radio groups that the policy may not quite live up to their expectations. There has been intense speculation about the policy ever since the broadcast regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) (www.trai.gov.in) submitted its recommendations on community radio to the Government of India in December 2004. But community radio has been a matter of heated debate long before TRAI, in an unprecedented move, issued a consultation paper and held open house discussions on the subject late last year.

It was ten years ago, on December 9, 1995 that the Supreme Court handed down its historic judgement on the airwaves, stating, “Airwaves constitute public property and must be utilised for advancing public good.” A year later, a group of policy planners, media professionals and civil society organisations gathered in Bangalore to study how community radio could be relevant in India. A ‘Bangalore Declaration’ was signed, which has formed the basis of advocacy for community radio since then. Many meetings, workshops and conferences were to follow, including one in Hyderabad and Pastapur (Andhra Pradesh) in July 2000, which urged the government to create a three-tier structure of broadcasting in India - state-owned public radio, private commercial radio, and non-profit community radio.

Community radio has three key aspects: non-profit making, community ownership and management, and community participation. As community groups have defined it, “Community radio is distinguished by its limited local reach, low-power transmission, and programming content that reflects the educational, developmental and cultural needs of the specific community it serves.”

In December 2002, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting released its ‘Community Radio Guidelines’ (www. mib.nic.in). To community radio groups, who had been expecting a break-through, these guidelines were a major disappointment. The guidelines restricted community radio licenses to ‘well-established’ educational institutions. News and current affairs programmes were banned, and advertisements, which would have brought in some much needed revenue were also prohibited. The licensing process proved so cumbersome that the first campus-based community radio (CR) station in India – Anna University’s ‘Anna FM’ came up only in February 2004, and fewer than 10 campus stations have started broadcasting so far.

In a tacit acknowledgement of the limited success of its campus radio guidelines, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry organised a workshop in May 2004 in Delhi to design an ‘enabling framework for community radio in India’. The workshop brought together a large number of community radio enthusiasts, NGOs and policy makers, who worked out a set of recommendations for a new community radio policy, one that would allow community groups to run their own radio stations.

The participants agonised over many issues while making their recommendations for community radio, walking a difficult tightrope between the desirable and the feasible. They were all too painfully aware that the government had its own set of concerns about community radio, not the least of which was a perceived threat to national security.

What should be the eligibility criteria for licensees? Should the government adopt non-eligibility criteria and consider the claims of all legal entities with the exception of political parties, religious groups and banned organisations? Would a 100-watt transmitter serve the needs of all geographically bound communities? What about the villages of, say Kutch, which would require very powerful transmitters to reach just a few scattered settlements? Could political news be permitted on community radio? (“What’s non-political?,” shot back a CR activist, “In our villages, even digging a well is political!”) And how much advertising could be legitimately permitted on a community radio station? “None at all”, thundered the purists. But others want unlimited amount. TRAI recommends 5 minutes per hour.


Credit: Yves Beaulieu, IDRC, 2003
The May 2004 workshop and the government’s draft CR policy based its recommendations by addressing these concerns meticulously and equitably. When TRAI held its consultation later that year, it came as no surprise when they arrived at much the same formulations for community radio.

From press reports following the recommendations of the Delhi workshop and the TRAI consultations, it is clear that the government has drafted a community radio policy that addresses the three main concerns of community radio groups:

• permitting communities through NGOs and other legal entities to set up their own radio stations;
• allowing community radio to broadcast local news;
• allowing the stations to sustain themselves through advertising revenue.

The licensing procedure is also being simplified, although a single-window clearance for CR licenses may prove difficult to achieve. The other terms and conditions including technical specifications are not likely to be very different from the existing campus radio guidelines.

While drafting these genuinely liberal provisions for community radio, neither the government nor the community radio groups were re-inventing the wheel. Many of the recommendations were drawn from the best provisions in the CR policies of countries like Australia, Ireland, Canada and South Africa, which have some of the most successful community radio movements in the world. Even in South Asia, India has been a laggard in permitting community radio. Nepal and Sri Lanka have thriving community radio initiatives for years. Indeed, the entire radio scenario in India is rather depressing. Governed by archaic laws (Indian Telegraph Act, 1885), radio in India has never lived up to its potential, with barely 260 radio stations in a country of a billion people. Our Asian neighbours have hundreds of radio stations, like Thailand with over 700 stations, and Indonesia with over a 1000. Even tiny Philippines has 350 radio stations, with 90 percent of them in private hands.

“Community radio is distinguished by its limited local reach, low-power transmission, and programming content that reflects the educational, developmental and cultural needs of the specific community ...”

Not surprisingly, these countries also have thriving community radio movements. The Frequencies Act of 2000 in Thailand, for instance, assigns 20 percent of radio frequencies to community broadcasting. Some 190 community radio stations are recognised by the Thai government, Indonesia has several hundred CR stations, since many of them operate in a legally grey area. East Timor has at least 16 CR stations. Nepal, in spite of Radio Sagarmatha and its successors, does not have a separate CR policy.

India, on the other hand, has just a few scattered CR initiatives, like ‘Kunjal Panchchi Kutchji’, a community radio programme produced by the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan and broadcast from AIR Bhuj and Rajkot; ‘Chala ho Gaon Mein’, broadcast on AIR Daltongunj in Jharkhand; ‘Namma Dhwani’ in Budhikote, Karnataka, which uses a co-axial cable and loudspeakers to ‘narrowcast’ its programmes and the Pastapur initiative, where the Deccan Development Society uses cassette tapes to distribute their programmes. Other initiatives have come up in Jharkhand, Gujarat (Self-Employed Women’s Association’s ‘Rudi no Radio’) and Uttaranchal, but none of them are permitted to run their own community stations. In fact, the only true community radio experiment in independent India, the Oravakal Community Radio in Andhra Pradesh ran into rough weather soon after it went on air on October 2, 2002, and was closed down by the government within four months for operating without a license.

India’s community radio policy has been slow to evolve, and the end is not yet in sight. But as a Ministry official said to me when I spoke enviously of the community radio stations in neighbouring Nepal, “Yes, but look at the their CR stations now. They have all been closed down quite ruthlessly. Our CR policy may take a while to develop, but when it does, you know it will be good and it will serve you well for a long time.”