[cr-india] Re-invoking the spirit of Pastapur

[Vinod Pavarala]

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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