ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical examination of the so-called third-sector radio (public and private radios being the other two) in South Asia. The evolution and growth of radio in the region, from about the 1920s during the colonial period, has been quite firmly embedded in a development paradigm. Community radio, whose history is about 20 years old in the subcontinent, has been predicated upon the development and social change imperative. This framework has not only defined community radio in this part of the world but also inhibited its evolution into a truly alternative medium based on communication rights. Using examples, primarily, from India and Bangladesh, and, secondarily, from Sri Lanka and Bhutan, we argue that both the state and civil society have been complicitous in framing community radio within a post-World War II discourse of development communication. While grassroots media initiatives such as community radio emerged globally as a challenge to the dominant paradigm of linear, top-down communication from the elites to the marginalized, in South Asia, even as the rhetoric is grafted on to a participatory communication perspective, community radio has been co-opted into an anodyne model of ‘development radio’.
