The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has embarked upon an important project of self evaluation for Community Radio Stations. The project would enable people and stations to look back as well as look forward by carrying out the process of self assessment.

Although the policy has been around for about ten years, and today the oldest radio station is probably ten years old, there have not been many moments of reflection where, the stations have stepped back and asked themselves what they have achieved and whether they were where they supposed to go?

When applying for a license, it often happens that the person involved in the licensing process, as in the case of a campus radio it is probably the registrar or if it is an NGO then it is probably the head of the management team; is the person who goes through the entire licensing process and signs on the dotted line. They are rarely the people who are there after involved in the operations. So, the people who have to take the baton and run are really not even aware of the policy provisions or the different steps in the licensing process

In many ways when we talk of self regulation, the starting point is policy compliance. The policy defines what a station should be, who its community is, and how they should engage with them and that their content has to be participatory, and so on.  Whether they are a campus station or an NGO station, the content has to be community centric and community generated.

At the cost of sounding hackneyed, let me repeat an often heard line that Community Radio Stations are for, of, by, in and with the community.  To what extent is this really so?  In a sense, the policy provisions inform peer review. Turning the question on head, how will the peer review inform policy?

After a decade of practice, the policy is up for review and some issues would certainly come up in the peer review. The earlier policy had said that the educational institutions can only locate their transmitter within the campus and NGOs had the freedom to locate it in the area where they operate.

Given that the reach of the station is only about 10-15 kilometers, in very large campuses two-thirds of the listening zone would be within the campus and the students are not necessarily their only community,  because here again  the policy binds them to reach out to the community outside the campus as well. So, the CRS’s efforts fall between two stools, when students are in their classes they are not listening to the stations and when they go home they live outside the hearing zone. It does not make a huge amount of sense to say that students are the main community because they are not in the listening zone.

Equally, people who are outside the campus, sometimes already at a distance of 12-15 kilometers from the campus, are the  targeted community which means the station is barely reaching a belt of only 3 kilometers of the listening zone.

There are challenges which would come up in the peer review especially when the campus stations have to define who their communities are. Hopefully when the new policy revision comes, it will be discussed whether the educational institutions may also be allowed to locate the transmitter in an area where they think it will be able to reach out to their community. There are many cross over points like community engagement, level of participation etc and all this will perhaps come to light during the peer review process. It will be a symbiotic relationship where the policy informs the peer review and the peer review process will have many pointers which can be looked at, at the time of policy revision.

Rukmini Vemraju is a Community Media Expert