[cr-india] TRAI Open House in Delhi - first impressions

[sajan venniyoor]

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On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 Arun Mehta wrote :
>As far as rural areas are concerned, nobody is going there. I would oppose any license fee there at all. 

As Baijal has pointed out, defining 'rural coverage' is notoriously difficult. Even AIR's Local Radio Stations, with 6 kW transmitters, cover a considerable rural landscape even though they are situated in smaller cities and towns. If you remember, TRAI has recommended that commercial FM stations should be permitted 50 kW transmitters. And TRAI wants every town with over 1 lakh population to have a commercial FM channel.

>I think the TRAI is amenable to the newspaper model. Many of the participants at the meeting seemed to support the basic stand. 

What exactly is a newspaper model? And how would it work in the context of radio, especially since commercial FM has been prescribed a radically different broadcast model? 

>If a justification is needed for why we want preferential treatment as compared to commercial radio, it is this: we serve a socially useful purpose. We disseminate the kind of information government often wants and needs disseminated. More importantly, we allow the voices of the poor people to reach back.

Forgive me for saying this, but the Government's perception of the potential of CR (and the voices of the poor) is somewhat different. Most of us would remember this quote from a former Secretary, I&B: "As of today we don't think that villagers are equipped to run radio stations. People are unprepared, and it could become a platform to air provocative, political content that doesn't serve any purpose except to divide people. It is fraught with danger." 

>So, could we please discuss definition? Under what circumstances would one say, this is community radio, or this isn't?

How do we define CR in terms of carriage, other than by putting numbers to various technical and commercial parameters? TRAI is the regulator for carriage, not content. 

Sajan.