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Radio : Alternate Problem Solving Tool For Tribal Areas

Social Issues Tribes and Races
  • Published on: 17-Jan-16
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Radio : Alternate Problem Solving Tool For Tribal Areas

 

  • Many of the estimated 80 million members of India's tribal communities lack access to any mainstream media outlets. This often poses serious barriers to their socio-economic development, as their grievances about government neglect and economic exploitation remain unvoiced.
  • Certain factions (such as the Maoist Insurgency) can exploit their frustration and isolation to violent ends. To address this  problem, there is a need to inclusion of tribal communities in media in order to voice their problems and opinion.
  • Tribal communities are normally neglected due to lack of accessibility, unique language and illiteracy.  In order to include them into media  there is urgent need to approach them  and making of  interactive platform in their language.
  • To address these problem some initiatives like CGNet Swara, bultoo radio are established .
About CGNet Swara

  • CGnet Swara  is an Indian voice-based online portal that allows people in the forests of Central Tribal India to report local news by making a phone call.
  • A portal freely accessible via mobile phone, that allows anyone to report stories and listen to them by giving a miss call.
  • Reported stories are moderated by journalists and become available for playback online as well as over the phone.
  • CGNet is an organisation operating in the Central Gondwana region, including areas of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha: states that hold the largest rural, agricultural and tribal populations.
  • The portal comprises four components: callers, who give missed calls to the portal phone number to either report or listen to news; a server that returns the call and collects and stores the audio bytes; moderators, who publish the byte on the website; and website visitors, who can be either journalists from the mainstream media who want to cover a certain story, non-governmental organizations that want to extend support, urban activists who follow reported stories, or local authorities who want to address grievances.
About Bultoo radio

  • The mobile phone is common in every household even in this remote Adivasi district. People earlier used it only to make calls. Now, they also use it to report on the happenings around them and to listen to the “Bultoo radio”. If wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) haven’t been paid, if forest right deeds have not been distributed, they report about it in Kuduk language.
  • Once the messages get recorded on a central computer connected via the Internet, they also get translated into Hindi and English. Then it reaches officers such as Collector  and gram panchayat.
  • One person from each village comes to the gram panchayat office every day and downloads the daily programme of “Bultoo radio” on his mobile phone and shares it with all villagers upon return with the help of bluetooth.
  • This is a small experiment being carried out over a small area but its problem-solving potential and its use of the local idiom can bring people’s faith back in the system.
Analysis:

  •  With many Adivasis now having access to mobile phones, we need to train and encourage them to record their songs and report their problems in their language on platforms like CGNet Swara.
  • Community radio would have been an ideal solution, but radio licenses are tightly controlled in India, and the nonofficial broadcasting of news, even the discussion of news and current events on air, is strictly forbidden.
  •  High illiteracy rates among the very same villagers who needed and wanted a voice in the media ruled out newspapers or magazines, and there is no Internet to speak of in rural Chhattisgarh. Only 0.7 percent of homes in Chhattisgarh have access to the Internet.
  • Most potentially lifesaving result of CGNet Swara's stories is the increasing awareness of malaria in Chhattisgarh. This area was considered malaria free by public authority due to lack of interest and negligence.
  • Adivasis become Maoist supporters because we do not talk to them, because we do not help them solve their problems. Mainstream India only talks to the ‘creamy layer’ of Adivasis, those who have learnt our languages. Many a time, this small but powerful section has let down fellow Adivasi brethren more than any outsider.
  • Reaching out to the Adivasis living in remote areas is admittedly difficult since many of these areas are controlled by Maoists, but we can talk to them through the airwaves. We need to reinvent the radio to solve the Maoist problem. We need to democratise short-wave radio. We need to be creative like “Bultoo radio”.
  • Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. A top-down All India Radio will anyway be of little use; we should strive to create a bottom-up media which is more participatory. We need Adivasi broadcasting cooperatives. We need democratic and real social media.
  • Maoist insurgency is a 19th century problem which has a 21st century solution. However, an Internet-centric approach is not enough. This is still an oral country. We need to connect Internet with voice to reach the last mile, as is being done with “Bultoo radio” in Balrampur. We also need to use the 19th century technology of short-wave radio, which may be an obsolete technology for urban India but is still the only communication technology for many Adivasis in remote forests
 

By: Vishal
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