Community radio in South Asia: Issues, challenges and the way forward

This paper explores the issues and challenges that the community radio (CR) sector in certain South Asian countries faces today. Section 1 provides a brief comparative overview of the status of CR in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Section 2 investigates the key factors that need to be addressed in order to create an enabling environment for CR in these countries. Section 3 contends that CR in South Asia offers interesting opportunities for convergence with other media and ICTs. It explores two types of convergence: the integration of mobile phone technology with CR and the use of innovative application software to automate certain CR operations. Section 4 reviews the focus areas of the major stakeholders in the CR development space, concludes that far greater importance needs to be attached to the integration of CR with other technologies, and proposes a few actions in this regard.