India’s First Community Radio Run by Dalit Telugu Women

“General” Narsamma sounds like a soldier’s name. For Telangana’s Deccan Development Society, an agricultural cooperative society run entirely by the Dalit women in Zaheerabad district and their sanghams, she is no less than a soldier. Not just her, they all are soldiers.

Although she is fondly called so for being the person who takes care of all the ‘general’ things, it is also for the purpose of differentiating the three Narsammas in the cooperative. Two of them work together in Sangham Radio, India’s first community radio and another in DDS’ Community Media Centre. It is a team of Narsammas and Poolammas and Lakshmammas of this drought-stricken rural village who built this from the ground up, and still run it: with unwavering determination, clarity, and a will that cyclones and pandemics couldn’t clamp down.

When the unprecedented COVID pandemic came, the two Narsammas stayed put at the radio station. “Covid didn't make much difference here, unless some visitor from outside came with the virus,” General Narsamma says.

They did however convey to their villagers about the dangers of coronavirus, and how to prevent it. The sangham radio has been talking about the villagers' health and life since the time of inception, even when they were narrowcasting. Narsamma would go to where her subjects are, record their audios, take the edited audios village to village and narrowcast them to the audience.

In 2008, Justice BP Sawant, who delivered the landmark verdict that airwaves are public property, switched on Sangham Radio for broadcasting on October 15th, 2008. Until then, they were not allowed to have their own radio station even though they had built their broadcasting tower more than a decade ago.

When they started the radio, they gave loans to the sanghams in each village to buy radios. When it was running on the UNESCO transmission, it used to be broadcast up to 80-90 kilometers.

“Although the broadcast was only in the evening, we used to call from morning itself, getting requests and complaints about which songs to play. Sometimes villagers will call and ask us to announce that their cow has gone missing, and if somebody has seen the cow, they would also call and inform,” Algole Narsamma laughs.

While sticking to the principles of what and why, Sangham Radio has however come a long way in how they have been telling their stories. From the narrowcasting days, then to the prosperity of over 1.5 lakh listeners every day, they now stand at the crossroads of a cultural shift where Youtube and Whatsapp have taken over rural communication. Sangham Radio updated too: Anyone who wants to listen can tune into their Youtube channel at 7.30 in the evening every day.

In a DDS short film called “A Radio of Their Own”, General Narsamma, the young girl she was in year wearing a skirt and top, sits on one of the bars on the metal tower. Unfazed by the camera focusing on her face, she asks the world, “Why, only big people are allowed to run radio stations or what? Small people like us do not have the right to do that? Why?”

28 years later, now a strong built woman with smile lines and heavy tan on her face, Narsamma’s voice has however not changed. “We are clear about what we want to broadcast. No film songs. No political propaganda. This is the community media for the community, and it shall stay so,” she says.