Nonetheless, AIR remains a deeply paradoxical institution. On the one hand, it offers a truly national service that, to borrow from the old Heineken adv, reaches parts of the country other broadcasters don’t. AIR’s sound archives – consisting of both north and south Indian classical music and the spoken word – offer a unique memory of music traditions and styles and a repository of the political history of the nation, including recordings by Tagore, Subhash Chandra Bose, Gandhi, Jinnah and other national figures. The digitization of these archives at a central level as well as in the regional centres is an ongoing project...
AIR has extensive experience of rural and farm broadcasting, with programs on land and water conservation, sustainable agriculture, biotechnology, integrated pest management for crops, crop insurance schemes, environment protection and disaster management, which have benefited scores of farmers in the country. AIR has played a critical role during natural disasters, most recently during the floods in Uttarakhand.
Both AIR’s FM radio Rainbow and the station in Najibabad helped relay information that was vital to the rescue operations. It played a similar role during the cyclone in Odisha and the tsunami that struck the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, both in 1999, as well as in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, and the Kosi floods in Bihar in 2008. Also noteworthy is its example as a community broadcaster – consider, for example, Radio Ujjas, which is broadcast from the Bhuj and Rajkot AIR stations – and the commercially successful Vividh Bharati. All this does suggest, that there is much, that AIR offers.
On the other hand, however, on the very same day that AIR released the music CDs of Pt Mallikarjun Mansur, the president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, announced the establishment of an AIR studio in Rae Bareli, her parliamentary constituency. The relationship between electoral politics and broadcasting in India is, of course, not new, given that during the dark days of the Emergency, AIR became a propaganda mouthpiece for Indira Gandhi, earning the sobriquet “All Indira Radio”, and a decade later, her son, Rajiv Gandhi, commanded the over-hasty expansion of broadcasting ahead of the 1989 elections.. The fact that Rajiv Gandhi heard of the assassination of his mother from a report by the BBC correspondent Satish
Jacob, a full five hours before it was announced on AIR, is a reflection of the fact that politics and political expediency have shaped the development of public broadcasting in the country.
The paradox that AIR currently is does it no favor. Although that is no excuse to retire the service or starve it out of existence, it needs to become an independent and genuine public service broadcaster. To be sure, AIR does possess the capacity to broadcast content that counts and that is different from the hyper-commercialised music and talk shows that have become the norm for radio in contemporary India. Surely, rather than letting it implode, we do need to collectively re imagine AIR as an independent public service broadcaster suitable for 21st century India – and hope that our broadcasting mandarins understand that a relevant and responsive public service broadcaster ultimately makes for good politics.
(Pradip Ninan Thomas in http://www.epw.in/ , Oct 05, via Jaisakhtivel)
(DSWCI/DX Window 490)