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14 Soc. Change 3 (1984)

handle is hein.journals/sclcnge14 and id is 1 raw text is: Social Change : March 1984 : Vol. 14 No. 1 Communication for Development* B..Venkatappiaht** Abstract Mass media, as Orwell had grimly predicted, are a powerful and subtle means in the hands of the political parties and the State to brain-wash and manipulate the masses. This pessimistic prediction of Orwell, however, need not necessarily be true for the developing countries like India. On the contrary, the media can be an agent of change and progress. The opportunities are there for all the different media-old and new--to participate in the grand endeavour of development. The mass media in India, to be an agent of development, have to be rural-oriented since eighty percent of the population lives in the villages. *Text of the Inaugural Address delivered at the National Seminar on Communication for Development on February 1, 1984 at the India International Centre, New Delhi. *Executive Chairman and Honorary Director, Council for Social Development, 53 Lodi Estate, NEW DEL H1-710003 3 I am happy to be with you today at the inaugural session of the National Seminar on Communication for Development. I greatly value this opportunity to make, at the very outset, a few prefatory comments on media on the one hand and development-rural development--on the other. Since the duty of introducing the subject or subjects has already been performed by the previous speaker, I hope I shall be excused for conceiving my role as prefatory rather than introductory. There is difference between the two. An 'introduction' must lead to the subject. A Preface, on the contrary, can wander about a great deal, provided always, at given moments, it can be led back to the prescribed theme. One of my pre-occupations, in what follows, will be the power which media can wield: the power for evil, no less than the power for good according as who controls which medium, in what way and for which particular set of purposes. And since most control tends to be from the centre to the circumference, another aspect which will engege attention will be the form and direction of the communication which accompanies such control: will the communication also be in the nature of one-way traffc from the ruler to the ruled, the producer to the consumer, the advertiser to the advertisee: or in our own particular context, from the benefactor to the beneficiary, the developer to the developee. If, on the contraiy, the operation of developmental media is envisrged as two-way, what-besides participation, extension and the like-are the techniques or processes which ensure the mutuality of communication? What, in relation to the rural scene, is the degree of correspondence between immediate reality as perceived by the villager and the story put forward for his benefit by the Governmental media? If this correspondence-between what one experiences and what one is told-is not significantly high in respect of any particular medium, to what extent does credibility suffer? Would the medium still serve some specific purpose (other than entertainment) such as supply of data about prices or information about inputs? Is developmental cornmutieation, then, most effective at the inter-personal level? Should it be left to dedicated voluntary agencies rather than institutionalised media or bureaucratised functionaries of Banks and Government Departments? Some of these questions, along with the doubts and misgivings which surround them. may be said to be part of the preoccupation to wich I have alluded. At this stage, let me strike a cheerful note by reminding myself that this is the 1st of February and that we have therefore as many as II months of the New Year still left with us. Substantially, therefore, the opportunity presents itself of wishing ourselves a Happy New Year: in fact, a Happy 1984. That figure 1984, rings for all of us a bell which takes us back 35 years to 1949, when George Orwell published his Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was also a time when the first of theIndian Five-Year plans was zetively brewing, preparatory to emergence in less than a couple of years thereater. I confess I do not know why Orwell- who was born in India and was otherwise connected with this country-chose 1984 as the chronological setting for his novel. Perhaps he wrote the bulk of it in 1948 and felt impishly that a reversal of the figure-48 converted into 84-would be good enough for his purose. One can only guess. Certainly, he did not set out to do a futurological exercise. It is further my contention that what he had in mind primarily, as the looming super-danger of the century, was not the political tyranny of dictatorship but the - technological tyranny of the media. It is not clear even at the end of Orwell's novel, whether the Big Brother is a Digitized from Best Copy Available

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