The transmitter and the feed

Every month since October 2014, at eleven on the last Sunday, the Prime Minister of India has spoken to the country over the radio. Man Ki Baat, thirty minutes on All India Radio.

Lately he has also picked up a phone, held it at arm's length, and made a Reel. To reach the young, he said, you go where the young are.

I build radio. So I say what follows not as an outsider pronouncing a verdict, but as someone who knows what a transmitter does to a valley when the signal finally clears. Community radio was meant to be the voice of the voiceless. Nepal ran South Asia's first station, Radio Sagarmatha, in 1997. India opened the door in 2006. The promise was specific: not broadcast, but conversation. Not reach, but belonging. A station a village could hear itself in.

And yet the anger of India's young, when it simmered, never became a broadcast. When the floods came through Nepal this August, the loudest voices were the UN and the phone networks. Somewhere between the promise and the transmitter, the thing got lost.

I do not say this to bury the medium. I say it because I do not want to watch the medium be buried by mistake. There is a habit now of writing radio's obituary from a comfortable distance, and it misses the point. Radio never failed to reach people. It reached them beautifully. What failed was a particular institutional form of it — the licensed, tower-bound, approval-seeking community station that spent two decades becoming a poor cousin of the state broadcaster.

The young did not abandon the idea of belonging. They abandoned the frequency, because the frequency had stopped belonging to them. Instagram is not what community radio wanted to become. It is what community radio wanted to prevent — a private platform that owns the room where everyone gathers. And the fact that it is winning is not a sign that radio was the wrong idea. It is a sign that the idea was never allowed to fail on its own terms, only to be outrun.

Seven in ten Indians are now online. In the countryside it is barely four in ten. Read that gap carefully, because it is the whole story. The gap is no longer between those who have a voice and those who do not. The gap is between those who have been handed a feed and those who still need a transmitter. And the second group is not small. It is the village the community station was built for, still waiting.

So I put the question plainly, and I want the argument, because I do not have the answer. What did the community station give a village that the feed does not? If the answer is nothing, then we should stop mourning and start building whatever comes next. If the answer is something — a room of one's own, a voice that answers back in the same tongue, an audience that knows your name — then the work is not to save the old stations. The work is to give that something to the people the old stations left behind.

I have my guesses. I would like to hear yours.