Ram Bhat, Vice President of AMARC Asia- Pacific, explores what issues India’s CR Policy needs to revisit, just so that it is a more robust policy.

The first thing that needs urgent attention is the Basic or Guiding Principles of the CR Policy Guidelines. The current document starts right away with eligibility criteria with passing mention of five principles that need to be adhered to. These are: non-profit in nature; geographically defined community; programming relevant to the needs of the community; management reflective of the community that is served and legal status of broadcaster.

These are very good universal principles which ought to be retained in any revised policy document as well. However, I am of the opinion that a policy document is also located in the context of the country in which policy is framed. Apart from these basic principles, the Indian policy document needs to take into context a set of challenges that are perhaps unique to this country.

The basic principles need to take into cognizance these factors:

• Diversity: India is politically, culturally, linguistically, economically and socially diverse. Community radio, as a non-profit sector, should seek to strengthen diversity of the media landscape (media ownership, media content, media platforms/technologies), strengthen diversity of views, opinions and ideas in the public sphere
• Unequal Access: Urban areas have access to internet, TV, newspapers, radio and vibrant public spaces for information exchange as well as opportunities to voice out needs and ideas. Often rural areas are total media dark zones. To reduce this stark gap, the policy document needs to bring in a spirit of universal service obligations. For e.g., the policy could commit to ensuring that at least one community radio service is provided in every district of the country, or at least one community radio service is provided for every major language in the country. For example, the national telecom policy opens up with access to telecom services in remote, rural and hilly areas as the objective of the policy.
• Empowerment: The current policy document is a paternal document. It allows for provisions to meet the ‘needs’ of the community. I would prefer a document that is founded on the principles of social justice and communication rights. The policy document should make it clear that valuable FM frequencies will be made available free of cost to those community groups that do not have a voice, do not have access to information and those who have not enjoyed the benefits of India’s economic and social progress. In other words community radio should prioritise marginalized communities. There should be an active effort to place secondary importance to the middleman in this process – whether they are NGOs or educational institutions. There are practical and conceptual hurdles to be addressed, and both civil society as well as government has battled with these ideas. It is easier said than done, but if there is political will across the board, this can be achieved.
• Freedom of Speech and Expression: In the first ten years of the CR movement, it has been a strictly developmental movement, bereft of news, political and current affairs programming. The PIL filed by Common Cause may well change the course of this movement in fundamental ways. If permission to broadcast news and current affairs programming is given in the future, then community radio must be seen not just as tool for development but also as a pathway for grassroots journalism and media. It is important to acknowledge this in future policy documents – by recognizing community broadcasters’ right to freedom of speech and expression, as well as bringing in mechanisms (including self-regulation) that ensure the editorial independence of this medium. These mechanisms must not just uphold rights to practice free speech but also contain clauses that ensure responsible broadcasting, especially related to intrusion of privacy and fair and balanced programming.

These guiding principles will come in useful not just to locate the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of the CR policy document, but also serve as useful and foundational principles to guide decision making when there are competing interests within and from outside the sector.

Another major area which needs revisiting is the procedural aspect. All applicants in this sector have to deal with I&B and MoCIT ministry separately and twice over. This not only increases complexity for the applicant, but also decreases efficiency for the government. Files are routinely misplaced, information is not shared evenly even between Ministries, there are delays and so on. Of course it is possible to work towards a single-window mechanism. However, this makes it convenient for the applicant only at the ‘front-end’ as it were. If all processes are retained, and merely moved to the ‘back-end’, several structural problems may continue to ail the movement. In addition, the overall time taken to receive a GOPA and WOL may still be the same. Instead of the applicant waiting for SACFA, it will be an I&B official waiting for the SACFA on behalf of the applicant. The larger problem would still remain.

We have to realize that community radio is truly unique in the media landscape in India today. Allocation, licensing and administration, cannot be towards revenue maximization (commercial sector) or towards expansion of public broadcasting (public broadcasting sector). A policy ‘guideline’ document will only take us so far. For a truly integrated policy, we need to go beyond Cabinet level, and get this endorsed by the Parliament through an Act. A single Ministry should ideally be in charge, with clearly defined role and responsibility for the independent regulator. The government cannot fall back on administrative methods or allocation principles used for other sectors of the media. Some imagination and empathy has to be applied specifically for this small but growing sector.

The other, slightly more radical, but also quite practical option is to go in for a de-regulated or lightly regulated approach. Low power community radio stations need to be encouraged. It will increase availability of frequencies, and increase media diversity – a win-win situation. Such low-power radio stations can be de-licensed, and instead be asked to register with a self-regulatory body along with certain commitments on quality, vision and responsibility.

If there is a social, temporal and monetary cost involved with processing licenses (with multiple ministries getting involved), then it would be better to disincentivise the licensing procedure. Many applicants would opt for low-power radios, and the focus of the government could then be on strengthening self-regulatory bodies, providing independent funding, as well as enabling multi-stakeholder process to articulate notions on quality, responsibility and so on.