Funferal

Media access in India

A fascinating article in Hard News Media examines the prospects for media in India in the coming years. Drawing on the projections of the Eleventh Five Year Plan, it examines everything from print, to radio, to telecoms and the internet. On radio, it notes the differences between India and the west:

Unlike in the West, radio is among the expanding media in India, although, ironically, India is the only democracy in the world where news and current affairs programmes on the radio still remain a monopoly of the government-owned broadcaster, All India Radio. Over the coming three years, that is, till 2009, from barely two dozen FM (frequency modulation) radio stations in the country in July-August 2006, this number is expected to jump to more than 300, with several corporates already jumping into the fare.

For those interested, there’s a lot of information here, with attention paid to the inequity of distribution of access across the country, as well as government plans for change and development:

The government claims that there would not only be an electricity connection in each village by 2009 and a telephone line by November 2007, it is aiming for broadband connectivity in each village by 2011-12.