[cr-india] Workshop on ‘Community Media and the Right to Information’ at NCPRI 2013

[preeti raghunath]

*Workshop on ‘Community Media and the Right to Information’ at NCPRI 2013*

Practitioners and advocates from the community media sector made a
conscious effort to forge linkages with a popular social movement when a
workshop was organized on “People’s Right to Information and Community
Media,” at the National Convention on People’s Right to Information held in
Hyderabad on February 17, 2013.  The session, coordinated by the UNESCO
Chair on Community Media, University of Hyderabad, made the case for the
role media, especially community media, could play in enhancing local
governance and transparency.

Co-facilitated by Vipul Mudgal, Project Manager, Inclusive Media for
Change, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and Sukumar
Muralidharan, Independent Journalist and Programme Manager, International
Federation of Journalists (IFJ), key presenters at the workshop included
Vinod Pavarala, UNESCO Chair on Community Media, Chinna Narsamma and Algole
Narsamma of the Community Media Trust of Deccan Development Society,
Ramnath Bhat of Maraa and Vice-President, Community Radio Forum (CRF),
Sultan Ahmed of Drishti, Kanchan K. Malik and Vasuki Belavadi of University
of Hyderabad.  About 35 participants signed up for the interactive session,
on understanding how media in the country functions, and how community
media could be a potent tool in addressing issues of accountability and
transparency.

Vipul Mudgal and Sukumar Muralidharan drew the attention of the
participants to the functioning of the mainstream media, sketching out the
political economy of the media and how advertising revenues, more often
than not, dictate the ways the media function. “The media is most
non-transparent, and advertising growth, which in turn propels media
growth, does not implicate disclosure,” said Muralidharan, also
highlighting growing public skepticism about the media in the light of the
Paid News and Cash for Coverage scams. It is in this context that people’s
media can play an important role in facilitating not just horizontal flow
of information, but bottom-up as well, said Prof. Vinod Pavarala. He
underlined the urgent need for synergizing the right to information with
the right to communicate as enshrined in Art.19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.  Ramnath Bhat then argued for people’s right
to access the airwaves, invoking not only the Supreme Court judgement of
1995, but also the more recent SC observations in the 2G spectrum case that
emphasize ‘public good’ and ‘public interest’ as key criteria for spectrum
allocation. One of his suggestions was to allocate unused free-to-air
analog television spectrum for use by communities.

Besides the seven printed case studies circulated to participants, the
session presented three case studies, one each on community radio,
participatory video, and mobile telephony. Chinna Narsamma and Algole
Narsamma of the Deccan Development Society shared their experiences of
being part of the rural women’s video collective in Medak district and of
working at India’s first rural community radio station, respectively. They
emphasized their work in contributing to revival of locally-relevant
agricultural practices, and in sharing their media-making capacities with
similarly placed communities in different parts of the world. Sultan Ahmed
of Drishti then presented a case study, showcasing how the local community
used participatory video to inquire into the distribution of school
uniforms at a local government school in Gujarat. This was followed by the
screening of a multimedia presentation by a communication student of
University of Hyderabad on CGNetSwara, the mobile telephony experiment in
rural Chattisgarh that enables local communities to share information with
each other as well as draw the attention of authorities to a host of local
issues.

An interactive session followed the presentations, in which participants
and the presenters raised important concerns about allocation of airwaves
for citizens, operationalizing freedom of expression in the context of
social media, and more. The workshop session concluded with the drawing up
of a list of recommendations. These recommendations were then presented at
a plenary session of the NCPRI convention.
The recommendations can be downloaded here:
http://blog.uccommedia.in/uploads/2013/02/NCPRI-17-Feb-Resolutions-on-Media-and-RTI1.pdf


Thanks and Regards,
Preeti Raghunath

PhD Scholar
Research Assistant, UNESCO Chair on Community Media
Department of Communication
University of Hyderabad
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