Another kick in the shin...
... for the enterprising Indian.
An enterprising, free spirited Indian in the heartland starts an endeavour, he helps build a community bond, and makes a small income.
The Government of India in all its wisdom and magnanimity, promptly throws the book at him.
Read Gurcharan Das' whole column here.
MORE: This is BBC article that shed light on Raghav. In this case it might have done him in, as well. One of his fans said:
"The boy has intense potential, but he is very poor. If the government lends him some support, he would go far," says Sanjay Kumar, an ardent fan of his station.
To their credit the government did do something. I am wondering though whether a reverse policy, i.e. government subsidies. I wonder whether the same could be said of this as Rockefeller said of Alcoholics Anonymous:
EVEN MORE: Amit Varma chimes in, with some thoughts about pragmatic libertarianism. The gist of what he is saying seems to be, the government sucks, but it shouldn't do any harm.
An enterprising, free spirited Indian in the heartland starts an endeavour, he helps build a community bond, and makes a small income.
Bored with running an electronics repair shop, Raghav stumbled one day on an innovative way to broadcast radio from his thatched roof shop by slinging a transmitter on a bamboo pole with a total investment of Rs 50. The do-it-yourself community station became an instant success.
Raghav was happy and popular, besieged by requests from his fans to play their favourite songs. He earned Rs 2,000 a month — a nice return on his Rs 50 investment — fed his family of five and won the respect of villagers in the surrounding districts of Muzaffarpur, Vaishali and Saran within a 35 km radius of his radio station.
The Government of India in all its wisdom and magnanimity, promptly throws the book at him.
I wonder whether there is any end to this hypocritical stupidity. On the one hand the government promulgates a budget busting National Employment Guarantee scheme, that throws crumbs at the poor. On the other it goes around breaking the back of anyone who wants to stand on his own feet. India still hasn't won freedom, atleast not all of India.
Two weeks ago, on March 27, his station was closed and his equipment seized because he broke two laws, he did not possess a licence and he gave news on FM radio. A formal police complaint has been lodged against him.
Read Gurcharan Das' whole column here.
MORE: This is BBC article that shed light on Raghav. In this case it might have done him in, as well. One of his fans said:
"The boy has intense potential, but he is very poor. If the government lends him some support, he would go far," says Sanjay Kumar, an ardent fan of his station.
To their credit the government did do something. I am wondering though whether a reverse policy, i.e. government subsidies. I wonder whether the same could be said of this as Rockefeller said of Alcoholics Anonymous:
"I’m afraid money would spoil this thing." [Ref: DeKruif 1960]
EVEN MORE: Amit Varma chimes in, with some thoughts about pragmatic libertarianism. The gist of what he is saying seems to be, the government sucks, but it shouldn't do any harm.
posted by Gautam at 1:30 PM
4 Comments:
I sympathize with the disappointment with the GOI's (govt. of India) action here. However, here's a bit of a wider perspective, the way I see it, and the story is not all that bleak.
1) First, a note or two on the reports themselves, on the accuracy of at least one of them. Going solely by the dates, it appears Gurcharan Das's article came after, and presumably based on, the BBC reporting that appeared earlier (as per links to them in your post).
The BBC report cleary states "Raghav's station is truly a labour of love - he does not earn anything from it. His electronic repair shop work brings him some two thousand rupees ($45) a month."
Gurcharan Das states: "Raghav was happy and popular, besieged by requests from his fans to play their favourite songs. He earned Rs 2,000 a month — a nice return on his Rs 50 investment — fed his family of five and won the respect of villagers in the surrounding districts of Muzaffarpur, Vaishali and Saran within a 35 km radius of his radio station."
Why such misrepresentation by Das? Is it to score points over Govt.? Heaven knows if I haven't expressed myself loud and clear in the blogosphere about the need for entrepreneurial spirit among youth in India, but this kind of mis-representation is exactly what an entrepreneur, a businessman, should NOT practice. Whatever has happened to informed discussion, to understanding rationally what the hurdles are, to bringing a business, an economic and a market-oriented viewpoint as a possible solution to the problem?
2) Forget Das's article. Any one who is even to a small degree familiar with the consumer-oriented business models will tell you that in audio-video broadcasting business, the most successful - and perhaps the only viable - business model is advertizing driven. So how did Raghav "earned Rs 2,000"? Did his listeners - the villagers - pay him a few rupees per song? I don't think so.
Come on, you want to get angry over the ridiculousness of govt. rules on broadcast licensing, on what to broadcast and what not, then it's a different thing, but there's a better way. Airwaves, requirements for licensing spectrum, are all very very important and delicate matters. They go the heart of the forces that drive the society in one direction or the other, and must be dealt with carefully. Except for the 2.4G/5.xG even in US you need licenses to start yelling on the air.
3) And oh by the way, I am not entirely sure if that rule banning news broadcast (or rebroadcast) is such a bad thing. News production is an entirely different beast, compared to news consumption. One is a loaded gun, the other is not. As it is the bad propaganda, falsification, misrepresentation all these are already in vogue in media, and we must be careful before we allow "ordinary citizens" to broadcast whatever the hell they want under the guise of "news" and piroutte the society back a few more decades. Before you know these "ordinary citizens" are no longer ordinary but vested groups with no interest in market-based reforms hell-bent on demostranting that starting a company or a small-business shop is against the religion or something.
4) I have stopped tracking these two years ago, but there was some activity sometime ago by a "radio committee" on easing the rules for the private radio. One of the recommendations of this committee was to allow ordinary citizens to broadcast news. Not sure where this committee's at these days. You can start reading about it here.
5) There was also some news a while back about Radiophony, apt in this context. Here is their site, which is somewhat disorganized but the initiative seems quite interesting.
Regards,
Crazyfinger
Hey Cf,
A brief comment. Why should podcasts be unregulated if radio and TV news are not? I am not asking for regulation of podcasts, but just wondering whether you would use the same arguments to defend future regulation of News podcasts. I don't think there is such a thing as objective news, there is just reported news, which is prone to errors of omission and comission, quite charachteritic of humans in general. More specifically is All India Radio an obviously superior and unbiased source of news, when DD has been shown to be lacking in the face of competition?
I don't wholly buy the security conserns. Even if the military were to be alloted bandwidth, why should the remaining bandwidth be regulated? Block off High frequency bandwidth for the military. I haven't thought or read enough about this, so my comments are more exploratory than prescruptive,
best
Gautam
Well, the govt. regulation doesn't help, that much is sure. My main beef with this whole story is more to do with how "sensational" the story seemed to have been spun. I have cried foul in similar vein to such stories - how regulations prevent ordinary citizens broadcasting etc - from Indian press about three years ago, feeling as if a rug has been pulled from under the nascent spirit of entrepreneurship. I am disappointed that the ISM band (2.4GHz) and the UNII (5.xGHz) is still not license-free in India (still waiting for law makers to take action).
But it seems to me that it's really a much ado about nothing because even if these rules were to be eliminated, nothing spectacular is going to happen. I used to assume that there's this pent up spirit, a work ethic, a drive to innovate, a willingless to embrace profit-motive as a means to advance society, a willingness to work hard under the strange vagaries of business startup environment etc., all this spirit is there among Indian youth and we only need to tweak the laws, unclog the bureaucratic dungeons and let this spirit run amock - just as it is in silicon valley here - and we'll see great stuff emerging out of this chaos.
But alas, nothing of that sort is going to happen, is it? We are just not there, as people (I am not being a sceptic, just realistic.) I was miffed at the spin of the post because it alluded to such a pent up spirit, as if it's there. I sometimes think if such a pent up spirit - which was supposedly being quashed by the evil govt. regulations - were to be there, it would've found a way around the evil regulation already.
Those cliches, "where there's a will there's a way," and "necessity is a mother of invention," seem to be woefully untrue when it comes to India. So, rather than play "victim" to a govt. regulation, it is a much better proposition, in my opinion, to find loopholes in them and subvert the threat to innovation. If that creates a market and economic activity so big as to have substantial impact, then that would force the lawmakers to confront the issue in a realistic way.
We know there's a huge "demand" for black market cable service, stealing electricity from the poles, etc., all of which I think are simply big gaping invitations from the end-consumers to the entrepreneurs to innovate and deliver these solutions so that they don't have to steal. But where's the response? If ordinary consumers so boldly "innovate" (steal) to get what they want, what the hell is the problem with so called entrepreneurs to take advantage of legal loopholse, be innovative, and create markets? Instead, like that Yeats poem, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity..." we proponents of the market-based reforms seem to be playing victimhood card. Strange. I'd like to see where the discussion goes if we head in this direction.
Podcasting works in a somewhat different set of constraints, isn't it? No airwave spectrum is needed. My concern with airwave spectrum licenses et al., are not so much military, but big corporations whose economics of scale invariably force them deliver programming that are not necessarily helpful. Oh well. Big topic, not much time to comment. Thanks for your followup comment.
Regards,
Crazyfinger
Gautam, I tend to agree with most of the points raised by CF... Ours is a crazy society.. the kind of irresponsibility we see around ourselves demand regulations of certain nature. I don't agree with the present regulation policy but 'just anyone' like Raghav (am I being rude here?) opening radio stations would be 'too much' to be handled. On the other hand we all know how these licenses are bought by big corporates...
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