Whither Radio?
THE show cause notice issued
by Supreme Court on Tuesday to relevant government agencies and private electronic media
on a public interest litigation filed a day earlier has brought to the fore the issues
that have been much discussed particularly in the community radio promoters’ circles
in the country ever since Nepal’s first, and indeed, South Asia’s first
non-government, non-commercial, independent radio station, Radio Sagarmatha, got the
licence in early 1997 after a long struggle of almost five years. At the heart of the writ
petition, filed by convenor of Community Radio Support Centre of Nepal Forum of
Environmental Journalists, lies this: the provisions under which electronic media outlets
are made to pay royalty and renewal fee flies utterly in the face of the stated objectives
of the country’s communication policy that unambiguously advocates community radio.
When Communication Policy was formulated in 1992 by the country’s first elected
government after the restoration of multi-party democracy, it was much hailed by votaries
of community radio because it called for allowing private FM radio stations.
Unfortunately, it has been an extremely uphill task to get the spirit of that
forward-looking Policy translated into practice. The requisite conduciveness for the
growth of Nepal’s community radio is conspicuous by its absence with the result that
a scene where hundreds of community radio stations bloom in this country is not going to
appear too soon. Prohibitive licence fee, royalty and renewal fee, among others,
constitute a major set of disincentives to potential community radio broadcasters.
It has been over three years
now since Nepal liberalised radiowaves. In this period, only eight private, commercial and
non-commercial, radio stations have been established. Though opening the doors of radio
certainly earns the past governments pats on the back, the rate at which radio is
expanding is no cause for satisfaction. The lackadaisical bureaucratic attitude to
promoting community radio is to be blamed for this. Going by the prevalent mindset, it is
as if having in place National Broadcasting Regulations was all that the governments could
do in order to encourage community radio. That is a patently wrong thinking. There is a
need for active promotion of this medium and that encouragement should primarily come from
the governments that have, one after another, however stated their conviction that in
contexts like those of Nepal, radio was the only cheap and easy way to reach people who
are largely illiterate and live in areas where the reach of print media and TV beams is
difficult to extend to for various reasons. What better way to transmute that conviction
into action by giving a fillip to community radio through eliminating the hurdles posed by
restrictive provisions and phlegmatic licencing authority? Let’s hope the debate
triggered off by the writ petition yields positive results.
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