The Condition of Radio in India

chillibreeze writer — Hitesh Bali

‘You are listening to blah-blah radio station with your favorite RJ ‘blah’ who is going to talk about nothing and will play your favorite music all day and all of the night’. Sounds familiar? If yes, then you suffer from a disease that’s more common than you think: unawareness. Relax It is a curable disease but if the media continue to show the same shows and you don’t get time to read newspaper like most Indians, in the end you tune into the radio. But most of us are tired of listening to news on AIR and all the private FM channels play the same music all day and all night.

Government Monopoly
The biggest drawback of free Indian media is the radio monopoly of the government. We may have a free press and free media that broadcast news and more entertainment but for any democracy, the diversity of media is important and that is when the big radio debate comes to the forefront. A large percentage of Indian population has never watched TV. The TRPs generated are from urban India. Radio is the only source of entertainment in many parts of the country and undoubtedly the first true mass medium which broke all barriers of literacy and geography. In short, it prepared the society for what was to come in modern era in the form of television.

Radio is often called as the theatre of the mind - in India, it enthralled listeners with hit shows like ‘Binaca Geet Mala’and ‘Jai mala’. People sat glued to their radio sets just to listen to these shows and who can forget the voice of radio veteran Ameen Sayani. But today the radio is just a device to listen to music and cliché jock talk.

Radio is imprisoned by the government so that the naïve listeners in the rural region can listen to the propaganda and rhetoric of politicians. For any successful democracy communication is very important and one of the sources of communication is mass media. Unfortunately for Indian media, freedom means commercialization without any citizen participation. What is the role of radio in India?

To provide news (only Prasar Bharti holds the rights) and to listen to music through which music companies earn millions and most of the stations are playing the same music because more they play a song more will be the earning. In between all this, is there anything fruitful radio is offering to its listeners? Most of us are unaware of the power of radio. Mahatma Gandhi once said media is the best source to unite people but today in the age of knowledge, radio is the only source left which can unite people.

The illiteracy rate is so high which makes the proliferation of radio more important. Even the movie made on radio is a disaster .i.e. Himesh Reshammiya’s Radio. Talking of movies, one remembers the use of radio in Munnabhai 2, Sanjay Dutt playing Munabhai uses radio to solve public’s problems and guides them with the help of Gandhian philosophy. Munna bhai 2 is the best commercial example of what radio can do.

Using radio for solving problems in a democracy
India missed the trick after the independence when Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru declined the offer to make an autonomous body for AIR because he thought that Indian democracy was not ready for it, they should have taken some lessons from BBC, but BBC is not the only success story. In a small country like Nepal, Radio Sagarmatha is an unusual experiment. Some of the country's best known media organizations, the Nepal Forum for Environmental Journalists, the Nepal Press Institute, publishers of Himal magazine, and Worldview Nepal (a media related organization), have taken a lead in establishing Radio Sagarmatha.

Environmental problems have been a concern in Nepal for quite some time. Population pressures on the land in these rural areas have caused erosion and deforestation to reach alarming proportions. Low productivity, unemployment, and poverty are some of the concerns staring in the face of the country. Its supporters hope that the Radio Sagarmatha experiment will boost pluralism in the broadcast media in the South Asian region, where the scene has largely been dominated by large, sometimes-monolith official organizations. India hopes to follow this example to improve the economic and social well-being of the country's rural inhabitants, as well as to improve the communication between these communities.

The privatization of radio in India
The Indian media has never given much of importance to freedom of radio, even though most of the media houses own radio channels, like Radio Mirchi is a part of Times of India group, Perhaps the commercial bodies of these channel think that people are still unaware of the power of radio, for them it is just a music device, and the same media criticizes china for censorship in media when in their own country radio Is suffering the same faith. Indian radio is currently changing from a government monopoly to highly commercialized broadcasting. But this media needs to be democratized too. Privatization and total deregulation will not mean much to the average citizen if radio fails to get a chance to play a vital role in their lives. Perhaps radio will have a success story in India someday and the country will have sports channels, entertainment channels and many genres in radio.

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in April, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Hitesh Bali is a B.Com graduate and is pursuing a Master's degree in journalism. His passions include writing, meeting new people and adapting to different cultures.

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