Community radio
A campaign has been going on in the country for the past several years to introduce a new type of broadcasting media, which is widely known as community radio, but it has so far met with cold shoulders from policy level people for no justified reason, except only for fear of loosening their grips over local matters and their monstrous power undercut. But it has been proved that there is a lot of central level inadequacy to cope with local matters such as education, natural disaster, cultural life and many other issues. The need for people to share their views and concerns through a local media and policy makers listening to their voices is becoming a crying need.
Coming into being in 1947 at Sutatenza, a village in Colombia, by a young priest and amateur radio operator, Jose Salcedo, with the objective of running informal education, the idea of community radio matured into a truly community type in ownership and sharing and also turned radical through Miner's Radio of Bolivia in 1949 that heroically fought for the miners' cause until its trampling down by the government in 1980. Since then the movement for community radio has spread worldwide and even coalesced into the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) in 1983 giving further boost to its campaign. Across the globe, once remote and isolated corners are now kicking with thousands of such community radios. Finding its foothold in our backyard in South Asia through the state-supported Kothmale Community Radio in Sri Lanka in 1989, a truly community-owned radio station in South Asia began with the pioneering Radio Sagarmatha in Nepal in 1997, which brought the King's deadly rage upon itself in 2005, but is still kicking and alive. India caught up soon in 2001 with a decision to issue licences for private radio stations. In 2006 it made and approved a community radio policy. Now there are many such radio stations in that country.
In Bangladesh some NGOs have been campaigning for it. It has enormous prospects, as they argue, in disaster-prone areas, within excluded communities and for special purposes like education. It is especially important in facing the challenges of cyclone and tidal bores in coastal districts of Patuakhali, Bhola, Chittagong etc. There such radios will be helpful in spreading warnings, taking precaution, minimising damage and mitigating sufferings through information sharing.
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