MEDIA: Marginalised Find A Voice On Radio And TV

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mahesh Uniyal

NEW DELHI, Feb 25 1999 (IPS) - Working with a simple hand-held video camera, four women in one of the most backward parts of south India have produced short films on issues affecting their lives and are negotiating for a slot on a big regional TV channel.

“I had no idea what cameras could do and always thought that only educated city people could handle them,” said Narasamma who also works as a farm hand in the hamlet of Pastapur in southern Andhra Pradesh state to support her seven-member household.

“We can tell our own story better than any educated journalist,” the illiterate film maker added confidently, to applause from an international gathering here of women broadcasters.

The four women – Narasamma, Laxmamma, Mollamma and Punyamma – were among the delegates from Peru, Sweden, Finland, Norway Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Cameroon and Thailand who attended the 28th meet of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) held in the Indian capital last week.

They said they now want to use their cameras to document traditional farming know how so that “no one can patent it”.

“This is just what this conference is all about,” said Gundel Krauss Dahl, IAWRT president after listening to the women who were trained in basic film making by the non-governmental Deccan Development Society in collaboration with UNESCO.

The 48-year-old IAWRT aims to project women’s voices, views and experiences to help shape an egalitarian world order. Participants to the meet shared experiences on how radio and television can be used to advantage by marginalised groups.

The Deccan Society was set up by women like Narasamma and is a network of ‘sanghams’ (voluntary groups) in 75 villages of Medak district of Andhra Pradesh. According to P.V. Satish who supervised the training of the village women in film making this lasted nearly nearly nine months.

Like the Deccan Society, the Rural Women’s Radio in Zimbabwe started in 1985 by the Federation of Media Women has trained village women to become radio journalists. “Now we don’t want educated women to misrepresent us. We can do so ourselves,” rural women covered by the project say.

Media experts agree that radio and TV can help make up for the lack of literacy of the poor. According to Kiran Karnik, chief of Discovery Channel TV, the poor can use video effectively to influence those who make decisions affecting their daily lives.

Karnik, who has been associated with India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) which has also trained illiterate women in film making, said video can help “bypass the literacy barrier.”

Gerd Inger Polden, a television producer from Norway, said new film making technology has “provided access and let in voices that have not been heard so far.”

Others at the meet thought that radio was an even more effective and cheaper way of doing this.

According to Nonee Walsh of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who has worked extensively in community radio this has helped the Aborigines in her country feel “empowered”, specially “hearing someone speak in their own language.”

The first community radio station was set up in Australia in the early 1970s and now there are hundreds owned and run by different groups. These include the Aborigine Icoori Radio and the Imparj TV station set up by the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association.

Sucharita Eashwar of VOICES, a communication resource and advocacy group based in the southern city of Bangalore, sees a transformation ushered in by community radio in the Indian countryside in the coming decades.

Eashwar, who is also vice-president of the Toronto-based World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, sees radio as the “most powerful tool of communication” as it reaches the “remotest hamlet” where even the poorest can afford the cheap radio sets.

Her group is working to “ensure that the interests and voices of those sections of society who are not the primary target audience of private commercial broadcasters, but who nevertheless form the majority of the country’s population, are not submerged and marginalised,” she told the gathering.

VOICES, along with another non-governmental organisation in Chitradurga in southern Karnataka state, is helping local people record their own radio programmes which are aired once a month by

the local station of the state-run Air India Radio (AIR).

One of the pioneering community radio programmes in India, the half-hour session, known as “Our voices”, includes a mix of entertainment and discussion on issues of health, farming, schooling and raising the status of women.

Radio broadcasting in India is the preserve of the government, but Eashwar disclosed that the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has “assured us” that community-based radio stations would be part of the proposed opening up of the electronic media.

However, such efforts to benefit the marginalised, run the risk of resistance from “vested interests,” the delegates were told by Bela Trivedi of the Development and Educational Communication Unit set up by the Indian government’s premier space research organisation.

Trivedi recalled how community television stations, which were part of a rural communication project of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Khera district of the western state of Gujarat in the 1970s, ran foul of the upper castes.

Over 1,000 television sets were set up in 900 hamlets of Khera so that villagers could watch programmes made by people like themselves.

“However, the talk of empowerment of the lower castes was not liked by the Patels (the upper castes) who seized the sets (which were kept in the offices of the elected village councils dominated by the higher castes),” she said.

Fortunately, more often radio and TV have been able to give a voice to the marginalised.