[cr-india] "Old Medium, New Connections: Community Radio in Bangalore"

[sajan venniyoor]

OLD MEDIUM, NEW CONNECTIONS: COMMUNITY RADIO IN
BANGALORE<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/community-radio-in-bangalore.html>
By Sonia Faleiro | The New Yorker [Blogs] | 5 Sept 2013

On a breezy April afternoon in Bangalore, a young, visually impaired radio
host named Jaidev sat straight-backed before a console mic at the offices
of Radio Active, the city’s first community radio station. He prodded his
listeners—mostly low-income workers—to take an unusual pledge: to never
discard certain fruit peels. “You want a cheap, delicious curry?” said
Jaidev. “Use watermelon rinds.”

Bangalore, a technology hub, is known as the Silicon Valley of India, yet a
third of its eight and a half million residents live in the slums. For the
poor, radio functions similarly to the way the Internet works for the rich:
it is their primary connection to the rest of the world. The poor are often
literate in name only, limiting the utility of newspapers, while the nature
of work keeps many people out on the street, away from televisions. After
the introduction, in the early aughts, of cheap cell phones with built-in
FM radios, eighty-seven per cent of Bangalore’s population now has access
to radio; across India, Internet penetration is estimated at just over ten
per cent. The city’s dozen or so commercial stations broadcast in six
languages, catering to its diverse migrant population.

The history of community radio in India goes back to British rule. In 1935,
the enormously wealthy Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur,
built three radio stations and installed a radio in every village in his
domain, at a reported cost of five hundred thousand dollars, so that his
subjects could receive dispatches on news, the weather, and health. He
referred to radio as “the voice from the sky.” After India gained
independence, radio in the country was state-owned; in 1995, the Supreme
Court declared the airwaves to be public property and commercial radio
stations were allowed to operate. In 2003, community radio stations were
also granted permission to broadcast. By 2010, India had two hundred and
forty-five commercial stations and a hundred and twenty-six community radio
stations.

The majority of community radio stations are in rural areas—places where
location, distance, poverty, and general disenfranchisement affect the
distribution of basic services—and they use entertainment such as drama or
folk music to reel in listeners. Radio Active, an urban station, uses a
different tactic: it broadcasts twenty-three hours a day, and its
programming is, in part, a response to the indifference of the mainstream
media, with a cast of hosts representing the full spectrum of city life,
particularly its most marginalized citizens. For instance, there are over a
million and a half auto-rickshaw drivers in Bangalore, but few besides Shiv
Kumar, the host of a show for auto-rickshaw drivers, have ever talked in
public about their health concerns in a meaningful way. Priyanka Divaakar
R, the transsexual host of a show about alternative sexualities, said that
films and television only engage with transsexuals for comedy’s sake. “So
where do transsexuals turn to for support?” she asked. “To whom do they
ask, ‘Am I the only one?’ And which other radio host will say to them, ‘I
am like you’?” Jaidev hosts a show for the disabled. “Young blind women are
susceptible to con men masquerading as eligible bachelors,” he said. “I
devoted an entire hour to the subject, begging parents not to marry their
daughter off to the first man who came along.”

The hosts, who have no previous radio experience, have been taught to
produce and edit their own shows. They carry digital recorders and conduct
impromptu interviews on the street, with signboard painters, cobblers,
street-food venders—people not normally heard in public forums in India.
“The upside of reaching out to isolated groups through someone they
identify with is incalculable,” said Vandana R. Jaikumar, a program manager
at Radio Active. “A woman may have spent her entire marriage behind closed
doors, terrified to step out even to buy milk, because her husband
expressly forbade her to. But if she switches on the radio and listens to
someone just like her talk of domestic abuse and how she survived it, she
might just speak out.”

The unique cell-phone-based infrastructure allows listeners to frequently
call or text into the shows, becoming active participants who shape the
station’s content rather than remaining passive listeners; they often use
their phones as reporting tools, breaking news from their communities, of a
road accident or civil unrest. (According to Radio Active’s internal
numbers, the majority of its two hundred thousand daily listeners tune in
with their cell phones.) And for listeners with a data plan—which is
extremely cheap in India—researchers at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs in
Bangalore have created CommunityWeb, a mobile app that allows users to
stream archived shows. Akhil Mathur, one of the researchers, says that they
might make the app free for mobile recharge stores, so that the stores can
install it for customers who pop in to have their pay-as-you-go phones
topped up. The app is currently in the early stages of deployment, but it
already has created a challenge familiar to successful content creators the
world over: “Listeners want new content more frequently,” said Mathur.

In February, the Indian government allocated roughly sixteen and a half
million dollars to community radio, giving it what the government described
as “the greatest fillip” it possibly could. Saying that “ingenuity has no
limits,” it proposed to set up over five hundred stations by 2017, to train
radio staff, and to invest in awareness campaigns, while also promising to
maintain the independence of the community-radio movement. The news was
welcomed in the offices of Radio Active, where hosts and producers often
worry aloud about whether they’re reaching enough of Bangalore’s neediest
citizens. “Information is like freedom,” said Manjula S., who hosts a show
for domestic workers. “You need it to live a good life.”

*Sonia Faleiro is the author of “Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World
of Bombay’s Dance Bars.”*
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*Source: *
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/community-radio-in-bangalore.html
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