Vol. 11, Special Issue 1 (2022)

Author(s):
Neha Arya and Kashyap SK

Abstract:
Community media help in community empowerment by fulfilling the community’s informational needs and by encouraging the community members in participation of their own development. The community radio is a very important community media tool to address and overcome the different community related issues by empowering the community members. The sustainability of community radio depends on various social, organizational, technical and financial aspects of the community as well as of the community radio station. The functional aspect of community radio stations run by educational institution is different than those of run by non-governmental organizations. The present study consist of eight educational institution operated community radio stations (EI-CRSs) and eight by non-governmental organizations operated community radio stations (NGO-CRSs). In the present study, the investigator determined the sustainability of different CRSs by exploring the different indicators of community radio sustainability. For this purpose a sustainability index developed consisting six different indicators namely social equity, social cohesiveness, programming and feedback management, organizational and human resource management, technical management and financial management. The perception of both the community radio listeners and the community radio functionaries regarding these indicators were collected and analysed in the present study. The results shows a difference in the perception of both the respondent groups. Among all sustainability indicators, the community radio listeners perceived to have high level of organizational and human resource management (50.41%) whereas the community radio functionaries perceived to have high level social cohesiveness (56.25 %). The NGO-CRSs were equally distributed into moderately sustainable and least sustainable categories i.e. 37.50 percent community radio stations in each category. In case of educational institute operated community radio stations, half of the CRSs were moderately sustainable. Overall the community radio stations were categorized as moderately sustainable (43.75%), highly sustainable (31.25%) and least sustainable (25%) community radio stations.