By Frederick Noronha BOMBAY, India Oct 20: Non-profit organisations longing to launch community radio stations in various pockets of this vast country have seen a new ray of hope in recent official announcements here.
According to an announcement in the media made in early July 1999, the Indian government has decided to privatize the FM sector in as many as 40 cities and opening up 150 channels to private broadcasters.
The announcement also said that community radio stations for "educational and public service programmes" would also be licensed.
Rules and regulations for community radio have however yet to be spelt out.
But that has not stopped those lobbying for the same to push ahead with their plans.
For the last three years, a non-profit organisation based in the South Indian city of Bangalore, VOICES, along with other interested organisations and individuals, has been strongly advocating for the licensing of Community Radio in India.
In 1998, VOICES was allotted air time on the local All India Radio station in Chitradurga, a rural district in Karnataka.
Karnataka is one of India’s 25 federal states, lies in the southern part of the country, and has a population of 44 million fitted into an area of 191,791 sq.km.
Recently VOICES says it "used this opportunity as a first step to introducing the concept of community radio in India." In Chitradurga, the project proved to be valuable hands-on learning experience towards its larger objective of setting up an independently-run community radio station.
But it was not free of problems.
For instance, part of the region targeted for broadcast fell in a shadow area.
People living there could not tune in to the programmes.
"This discouraged people from participating in the production and broadcast of programmes," VOICES spokesperson Sucharita Easwar told Radio World International.
But small setbacks have not been taken too seriously in India, a virgin country as far as community radio goes.
Despite its immense potential, there have been no community radio stations in the second-most populated country in the world, mainly because of the tight control the government felt the need to maintain over the radio medium in India.
VOICES is now working on a project to set up a community radio station at Kolar, also in Karnataka, with the participation of women’s credit and savings groups in the area.
"As a first step, we are planning to set up a centre for training the women of these groups to produce and narrowcast programmes," announced Easwar.
Meanwhile, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational and Social Organisation) has offered to make available by September a "briefcase radio station"—a portable production and transmission kit.
This will be used in Kolar to do experimental broadcasts of the programmes produced by women of the village credit and savings groups.
It will also be used at the National Law School of India to train students to produce and broadcast programmes on legal awareness, especially for women, and conduct legal clinics.
National Law School is one of India’s most prestigious training centre for young lawyers.
It is based in the Southern Indian city of Bangalore, the capital of the state of Karnataka.
When this happens, it would be the first step towards a campus radio for the student community in this university area.
Several other non-profit groups and even the Indira Gandhi Open University are getting ready to set up their own radio stations.
IGNOU is a prominent Indian open university, which has tens of thousands of students scattered all across this vast country.
But, the finalizing of licensing procedures is expected to take at least six months.
Regular broadcasts can begin only after licenses are obtained.
VOICES has meanwhile offered to "continue to support other groups by offering them training in programme production and providing them with the technical assistance required to set up their own community radio stations".
Further details and audio/radio programmes in English and the regional Kannada language can be obtained from this group.
It has also published a booklet titled "Community Radio: The Voice of the People" which offers guidelines on setting up a community radio station.
—(OI Features) TTD to computerise ‘Pallavi Charanas’ VIJAYAWADA, Oct 20 (UNI): The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), administering the famous lord Venkateswara temple at Tirupati, will shortly embark on a massive computerisation programme to preserve the ‘Pallavi Charanas’ of devotional songs composed by 15th century saint Annamacharya.
This would prove a boon for lovers of Carnatic music as well as research scholars.
Disclosing this to UNI here, Annamacharya project director Dr Medasani Mohan said that in all, the beginning stanzas of 32,000 Kirtanas of the saint-philosopher in praise of lord Venkateswara and Alamelu Mangai would be computerised in coordination with the Oriental Research Institute of the Sri Venkateswara university, Tirupati.
Glossaries of all the available copper plates on Annamacharya, the primary sources of information, would be taken up for the benefit of researchers.
Under this project, the TTD was also bringing out a special dictionary since the words and phrases used by the saint-composer, the first ‘Vyaghyakara’, were in the colloquial style of his period which could not be understood easily by present-day researchers.
World Bank fostering toxic trade in India, says Greenpeace NEW DELHI, Oct 20: India is among 20 countries that will bear the brunt of pollution caused by poison-producing medical waste incinerators promoted by the World Bank, warned campaign groups Greenpeace and Srishti.
The environmental organisations cited a new report released recently by the international coalition Health Care Without Harm, of which they are members.
"Citizen groups and communities in India must be warned about the World Bank’s complicity to poison us by financing incinerator proposals.
It’s a pity that the Bank hasn’t learnt from its past mistakes and continues to dump dirty western technologies and practices onto unsuspecting southern countries," said Nityanand Jayaraman, toxics campaigner with Greenpeace.
The report, "The World Bank’s Dangerous Medicine: Promoting Medical Waste Incinerators in Third World Countries" exposes the World Bank’s double standards in promoting a technology that is being phased out in the West due to pollution concerns.
Prepared by Washington DC-based Multinationals Resource Center, the report is an inventory of 30 World Bank and International Finance Corportation projects involving medical waste incineration in the following 20 countries: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Comoros, Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Malawi, Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Vietnam, Western Samoa and Zimbabwe.
Medical waste incinerators produce significant amounts of dioxin, a carcinogen and the most toxic manmade pollutant known to science, and mercury, a heavy metal which causes central nervous system, brain, kidney and lung damage.
Some weeks back, traces of dioxin in animal feed in Belgium caused the most expensive international food contamination scandal in history.
Medical waste incineration is increasingly being rejected in industrialized countries in favour of alternative treatment technologies because the public and policy makers have learned of the dangers of incineration.
In the United States, in 1990 there were over 4,500 incinerators in operation; the number has declined to less than 2,500 today and most of these are closing since they can not meet environmental standards.
Simultaneously, in 1997 alone, 1500 non-incineration medical waste treatment facilities were installed in the United States.
"Today when the Indian health sector and the industry is gearing itself to bring cost-effective solutions and non-combustion technologies to India, the World Bank is playing hide-and-seek with its incinerator policy.
The Bank should stop being a medium for dirty technology and should only support appropriate solutions," said Ravi Agarwal of Srishti, a Delhi-based NGO member of Health Care Without Harm.
The report is is available from the Multinationals Resource Center or on the world wide web at http://www.essentialaction.org/waste/worldbank —(Other India Features) About us | Advertisers | Other Publications | Subscriptions | Advertising Weather | Letters | Search | Suggestions | Send Mail | Vaishnodevi ________________________________________________________ (c) 1998, The Kashmir Times Press Pvt.
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