17 May 2026 Keeping the air alive: Community radio, cultural integrity, and alternative voices in India

Aniruddha Jena

Across India’s marginalised regions, the struggle for communication justice is not only about access to media. It is also about who gets to speak in their own language, whose knowledge is treated as valid, and which communicative forms are allowed to endure in the face of homogenising development. This is why India matters to the theme of cultural integrity and alternative voices.

Few countries compress so many languages, oral traditions, caste hierarchies, indigenous cosmologies, and uneven media infrastructures into one national frame as India. In such a setting, community radio is not merely a small media format. At its best, it becomes a social institution through which communities preserve memory, negotiate identity, circulate practical knowledge, and claim the right to define what development should mean in their own terms.

This argument needs to be made carefully. The language of the “information society” has long promised a more connected world, but critics have repeatedly shown that such promises often confuse information with justice. Classic debates on the information society warned against technological determinism and against the easy assumption that more information flows necessarily produce more democratic or equitable outcomes.[1][2] In the context of the global South, this critique became sharper.

Map by Jure Snoj, Call of Travel – This file was derived from: Indian-languages-map.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121289740

The digital divide, as Robin Mansell, Sundeep Madon and others argued, cannot be reduced to the spread of technical access alone. Development models that assume a uniform path toward an integrated information society often disregard historical, social, and cultural variation and misrecognise what communities actually need from communication systems.[3] Their alternative emphasis is especially relevant here: technologies become meaningful only when they are mobilised for local needs, through local intermediaries, and in ways sensitive to the social worlds into which they enter.[3]

That insight helps explain why communication justice in India cannot be measured only by spectrum allocation, connectivity, or market penetration. It also has to be understood through language, voice, memory, and cultural autonomy. WACC’s recent articulation of communication rights is useful here. It insists that communication rights are not abstract ideals but practical conditions for inclusion, representation, and justice, especially for those excluded by digital and media systems.[4] The phrase “nothing about us without us,” voiced at the WACC Partner Forum in Kathmandu, captures the deeper democratic demand: communities must not be treated simply as recipients of communication, but as agents who participate in shaping the terms on which communication happens.[4]

For culturally diverse and politically unequal societies, this means safeguarding linguistic plurality, creating safe spaces for marginalised groups to speak, and resisting the pressure to compress all communication into administratively convenient or commercially dominant forms.

India offers abundant evidence for why this matters. In many peripheral regions, communication does not arrive as a seamless public good. It is mediated by geography, literacy, bureaucracy, state priorities, and the market value assigned to specific populations. This is where community radio acquires significance. It works not because it magically solves inequality, but because it often operates as a human intermediary in precisely the sense described by information-society critics.[3] In developing-country settings, they note, citizens are frequently neither owners nor direct users of complex information systems; intermediaries such as NGOs, community-based organisations, and local institutions become crucial bridges between infrastructures and everyday life.[3] Community radio, when rooted in local participation, performs this bridging work through language, familiarity, trust, and continuity. It translates policy into experience, but it also does the reverse: it translates lived realities into public claims.

This is particularly important in multilingual settings. The pressure of standardised development often works through communication. Dominant languages gain prestige and administrative authority, while smaller languages are reduced to private use, folklore, or disappearance. Yet the issue is not only linguistic substitution. It is also epistemic. When a language is pushed aside, what is often marginalised with it are distinctive ways of naming land, forest, labour, kinship, ritual, memory, and obligation. That is why the defence of community media in culturally marginal regions is not simply a sentimental defence of heritage. It is a political defence of alternative knowledge systems.

Community-led communication processes

One telling example comes from the Koel Karo movement, where participatory communication strategies were inseparable from cultural continuity and collective resistance.[5] The case helps clarify the broader communicative ecology in which community media in India acquire their significance. The movement’s strength lay not only in opposing a dam but in sustaining Adivasi ownership through decentralised, community-led communication processes, in which shared identity, ritual remembrance, and collective decision-making were central.[5]

The account of Tapkara Martyrs’ Day is especially important. Annual gatherings and traditional rituals did not merely commemorate the dead. They renewed political memory across generations and kept the movement’s values alive.[5] This is communication as cultural reproduction, not just message transmission. It reminds us that alternative voices are not created only by opening a microphone. They are sustained by social forms that make speech durable, legitimate, and collectively recognisable.

This point also connects to broader debates on cultural flows in the information society. As Mansell and Madon observe, technologies do not simply spread universal practices. They are indigenised, hybridised, and negotiated within local social worlds.[3] Appadurai’s language of hybridisation, invoked in that discussion, is useful because it resists two false binaries: pure tradition versus modern technology, and local authenticity versus global contamination. In reality, communities often take up new media while reworking them through local cultural logics.[3]

Community radio in India has repeatedly demonstrated this possibility. It carries folk songs, oral history, agricultural advice, market information, local grievances, public-health messages, and cultural programming in ways that are intelligible within the rhythms of community life. Its value lies not in being outside modernity, but in refusing the idea that modern communication must always take a singular, centralised, and homogenised form.

At the same time, the defence of alternative voices cannot be romantic. Community media do not operate in a neutral environment. They exist within unequal power relations and narrowing civic space. The article on civil society in India that you uploaded is instructive on this point. It shows that civil society organisations are increasingly expected to function as “helping hands” of government, delivering welfare without asking difficult questions.[6]

Activities that advance the political interests of oppressed castes, workers, or indigenous communities are readily problematised as political or suspect, while “authentic” civil society is defined as compliant, welfare-oriented, and non-confrontational.[6] This matters for communication justice because the line between cultural expression and political action is often thin in marginalised communities. To speak in one’s own language about land, displacement, forest rights, food entitlements, or women’s dignity is not only to communicate culture. It is also to make claims on power.

This is why community-rooted communication matters so much. The same civil-society study notes that organisations with strong community support can sometimes withstand state hostility because local legitimacy gives them a degree of autonomy.[7] That observation resonates far beyond NGOs. Community radio, where genuinely rooted, draws strength not simply from licensing or donor support but from relational embeddedness. It matters whether a station is seen as belonging to the community, whether local people hear familiar voices, whether the station reflects local concerns rather than development jargon imported from elsewhere. Cultural integrity, in this sense, is not just content. It is a relation of trust and ownership.

A communicative space anchored in collective accountability

The challenge is sharpened further by the contemporary digital environment. WACC’s recent reflection on digital justice notes that digital disparities now concern not only access but the capacity to use technologies safely and effectively, especially for women and rural communities.[4] The piece also highlights how online spaces can become hostile, silencing women and reducing meaningful participation.[4] This has direct implications for any discussion of alternative voices. The migration of communication into digital platforms does not automatically deepen pluralism. It can just as easily reproduce exclusion, harassment, and cultural flattening. Community radio therefore remains important not because it is nostalgic or analogue, but because it offers a communicative space that can still be anchored in collective accountability and local social relations.

The larger lesson is that communication justice must be understood as infrastructural and cultural at once. Infrastructural, because communities need durable institutions, resources, licences, training, and supportive policy. Cultural, because the point is not simply to insert more people into existing communication systems, but to protect their right to speak through their own categories, memories, and priorities. This is where the information-society literature remains relevant. Duff’s reading of Daniel Bell reminds us that information and knowledge are not the same thing.[8] Information may consist of facts, reports, and statistics; knowledge involves interpretation, contextualisation, and the weaving of relationships into meaningful forms.[8] That distinction matters immensely for community media. A station that merely relays development information is not yet doing the fullest work of communication justice. The deeper task is to create a communicative environment where information is interpreted in locally meaningful ways and folded into collective knowledge.

Seen in that light, community radio in India should not be treated as a residual or supplementary medium. It is better understood as part of a plural communications ecology that protects democratic difference. It can host the everyday labour of cultural continuity: intergenerational storytelling, the circulation of local vocabularies, the recognition of customary practices, the public expression of grief, memory, and protest, and the translation of institutional processes into forms communities can inhabit. It can also provide something that standardised media and platforms often cannot: a sense that communication is still answerable to those who live with its consequences.

Policy implications

First, communication justice in culturally diverse societies must move beyond metrics of reach and digitisation. It should ask whether communities can speak publicly in their own languages, whether local knowledge appears as knowledge rather than folklore, and whether media institutions allow people to define their own communicative priorities.

Second, support for community media should not be folded into a narrow service-delivery logic. If stations are valued only as conduits for schemes and behavioural messaging, their democratic and cultural role will be hollowed out.

Third, communication policy must recognise that cultural integrity requires civic space. Where organisations and community institutions are discouraged from asking difficult questions, alternative voices are tolerated only so long as they are harmless. That is not communication justice. It is managed pluralism.

Finally, there is a broader normative point. The future of communication justice in India will not be secured only by more bandwidth or better apps, important though these are. It will depend equally on whether institutions are willing to recognise that marginalised communities are not simply latecomers to a pre-given communication order. They are bearers of communicative worlds of their own. The task is not merely to include them within dominant systems, but to protect their capacity to shape media on their own terms.

That is why India remains such an important case. Its density of cultural and linguistic plurality makes visible what many policy frameworks prefer to overlook: justice in communication is not exhausted by access. It includes recognition, memory, participation, and the right to sustain forms of collective life that do not fit neatly into centralised narratives of progress. Community radio, when it is genuinely participatory and locally rooted, offers one of the clearest institutional expressions of that principle. It keeps the air alive with voices that might otherwise be rendered inaudible. And in doing so, it reminds us that communication for all must mean more than universal transmission. It must mean the durable public presence of worlds that refuse to disappear.

Notes

[1] Mansell, R. (2010). The life and times of the Information Society. Prometheus, 28(2), 165–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2010.503120

[2] Duff, A. S. (1998). Daniel Bell’s theory of the information society. Journal of Information Science, 24(6), 373-393. https://doi.org/10.1177/016555159802400601

[3] Avgerou, C., Madon, S. (2005). Information society and the Digital Divide Problem in Developing Countries. In: Berleur, J., Avgerou, C. (eds) Perspectives and Policies on ICT in Society. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 179. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25588-5_15

[4] WACC (2025). Nothing about us without us: Why digital justice requires communication rights. “WACC _ Nothing about us without us_ Why digital justice requires communication rights.pdf”

[5] Rohan D. Mathews. “The Koel Karo People’s Movement in Eastern India.” Ritimo, 1 July 2011. https://www.ritimo.org/The-Koel-Karo-People-s-Movement-in-Eastern-India

[6] van Wessel, M., Manchanda, R., & Deo, N. (2025). How civil society in India is marginalized. Civic space as relational process. Journal of Civil Society, 21(3), 237–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2025.2515038

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

Dr Aniruddha Jena is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. His work focuses on communication rights, media policy, and the social impacts of digital infrastructures.