[cr-india]privatising the spectrum

[Vickram Crishna]

At 12:13 AM -0700 03/06/2003, Atanu Garai wrote:
>Anyway for sustainability both local and non-local partnerships must 
>be ensured. atanu
>
>Bandana Mukhopadhyay <mbandana at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I am getting the feeling that here in India we are asking for a 
>ready made policy in favour of CR without projecting a reasonable 
>public awareness or interest in CR.

Please point me to where in this discussion (aside from the quoted 
email) anyone can find this feeling?

>The ground realities are:
>
>1.	At present, there are only 4 instances where community are 
>involved in programme and radio is being used as an additional arm 
>for development

I was present at AMARC 8, where VOICES gave four examples of 
community radio like efforts at audio archival and dissemination... 
and that did not include Mana Radio, which was still functioning, and 
the only radio to air, at the time. I don't know which four are 
referred to above.

It is obviously in the interests of whoever supports grassroots 
action in community owned radio today not to reveal any results, and 
especially not in this list. Pity that this situation has come to 
pass.

>2.	Despite many positive reports of the impact of these CR 
>projects and a procative role being played by UNESCO to take forward 
>CR movement, no new group has come up with a desire to use radio for 
>developmental work

Surely a case of the tail wagging the dog?

>3.	All the existing projects are working with international 
>support and so far none of them are actually looking at 
>sustainability of the project through community participation

Hard to see how this is justified. But then the riots commission for 
Gujarat also publicly claims that people have not deposed evidence 
about police interaction, so there wasn't any.

>4.	Information about how to set up and run a CR project and the 
>rules that at present govern broadcast policy are easily available 
>on the net and all arguments that the state needs to do more are 
>falling flat because the ground realities are not compelling enough 
>for the state to change the present policy

Yes, the present policy is designed to fail, and having successfully 
continued to fail for the past five months, there is no reason to 
change it.
-- 
Vickram