Govt intervention- what lies beneath

Community Radio has made it big in India, and now there are roughly 200 organizations who have applied for a CRS license, i.e. to broadcast on FM.
So, I started wondering, that wow, not bad, the govt of our country has really improved, opening up policies, which allow people to express freely, to manage their own medium and so on. After all, they are opening up the radio sector, which was so far governed by the 1885 Indian Telegraph Act!!!
But then slowly, my focus has been shifting to the fine print of the policy, and sure enough: Broadcasting of news is banned!!
I mean, I'm getting tired of the exclamation marks in my blog, but that's what it is. No news, can you imagine? Even a local cable operator who has no idea what's happening can freely broadcast news on his local cable channel, but a properly registered and licensed radio station (that too at the Central govt level), cannot broadcast news.
Of course, all this is old hat, and people have been making suitable noises about this problem. Apparently, the Bangladeshi policy on CR has been modeled on India and so they will also be prohibited from broadcasting news. What a circus this is turning out to be!

Anyway, this posting is not about our great CR policy but more about what happened next. In an effort to help out the poor organizations who have applied for Community Radio licenses, the Department of ----- and ********, has started a project called "Community Radio: Women's health and nutrition", wherein it pays community radio stations money for each program. They are supposed to broadcast a series of programs, preferably a program a day, for one whole year. The topics are decided by the govt, of course.
We all know that the only "community" radio stations which are on air to date are:
educational institutions which are about 30 in number.
So about 13 of them have got the money from the govt, and happily started broadcasting programs on the topics given to them.
One may innocently ask where is the community in all this, but one should also realise that the Dept ******, the Dean of the Colleges, the professors and all the doctors and experts are also a kind of community! so this project is for them! and of course because of all the hard work they are putting in, they must be paid too! its only fair
Nobody knows how and why this women's health and nutrition was decided. Further most radio stations have become production houses, because with the amount of money being doled out through this project, one need not do anything else...so its exactly like a production house, making any kind of programs for anybody provided the right amount goes into the right pockets.
So the govt is happy that they have fufilled their mandate of making programs about women, and that too on Community Radio Stations!
The colleges are happy that their 20 lakhs investment is recovered.

Finally, seeing how everybody is so happy, I'm sure the communities who have to listen to these "brilliant" programs, must also be very happy. After all, they have no other work in their life apart from listening to these programs!

Of photographs and 'frame'works

It's always bothered me to see that there are such brilliant photographs to be seen around. In fact with the photography medium going digital, every second person can seriously start taking up photography. The second revolution is that photography has become integrated with mobile technology. So now the camera is well and truly mobile!
You see, I have a problem. I don't have a problem with too many things, but this one thing I have always had a problem with; namely, with 99% of the photos I've seen, either in a physical frame or a digital frame (blogs etc), the subject is never mentioned! Most of the people are nameless in most photos.
Once the privacy of a person (s) has been captured, then the least the photographer can do is to credit the person. Just say that, the person you see in the photograph is Mr. or Ms. ABC, from XYZ place.
With that simple acknowledgment, people turn from faceless objects of fascination to real people .
As media expands both horizontally and vertically, it is a given that the content will increase, the producers will increase and therefore proportionately, the number of anonymous people popping up on either your TV screen, or websites, or photo magazines etc will only increase.
The only way to fight the tide, is not to start telling the media individually to change, but to start creating the basis for a paradigm shift in approach.
Basically, some policies have to be created, or rewritten, with a strong bent on ethics. We need to put the debates on personal space, privacy and its equations with information distribution; on more public fora, where these tough decisions become a part of public consciousness.
So atleast, if you begin to bring out your camera and want to snap away at some random person you think is interesting, it'll make you think.

Of course, the topic I'm trying to write about, is a much larger theme, and there are a variety of other issues, like consent from the community, etc. But that's another story for another time!