When you think of media and development, you might picture a government advertisement on television urging people to get vaccinated, or a radio jingle promoting a literacy scheme. But the relationship between media and development communication runs far deeper – and has changed dramatically over the decades. From a time when communities were treated as passive audiences receiving top-down messages, to today’s landscape where local radio stations are run by Dalit women and folk theatre troupes carry development messages to rural doorsteps, the evolution of media’s role in development is a story of shifting power, growing participation, and an expanding definition of who gets to communicate.
Table of Contents
From one-way broadcast to two-way conversation
Early development communication operated on a simple, linear model: information flowed from an expert source to a mass audience. Governments and international agencies used radio, television, and print to disseminate messages about agriculture, hygiene, family planning, and national integration. The assumption was straightforward – expose people to the right information and behaviour will change. Communities had no say in what messages were created, how they were framed, or whether they reflected actual local needs.
This top-down model drew significant criticism over time. As research from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) notes, there is now increasing recognition among development practitioners that participatory communication is the most promising approach for reducing dependency and building self-reliance among communities. The shift was not merely technical – it was ideological. Development came to be understood not as something imposed from outside, but as a participatory process of social change within a given society, a redefinition influenced significantly by the work of theorists like Paulo Freire and Everett Rogers.
The new model insisted on two-way information exchange. Instead of broadcasting lectures, communicators were expected to listen, understand community contexts, and co-create messages with the people they served. The media’s role shifted from instruction to facilitation – creating spaces for dialogue, amplifying marginalized voices, and building consensus around shared development goals.
The power of mass media in development
Despite its limitations, mass media – television, radio, and print – remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching large, geographically dispersed audiences quickly. In a country like India, with vast rural populations and diverse languages, mass media has been central to delivering development content at scale.
Two landmark Indian experiments demonstrated both the potential and the constraints of this approach. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), jointly designed by NASA and ISRO and conducted from August 1975 to July 1976, beamed educational television programmes directly to over 2,400 villages across six Indian states. Its objectives were wide-ranging: educating rural populations on family planning, agriculture, and health; training teachers; and demonstrating the viability of satellite technology for mass communication in developing countries. The experiment ran twice daily – morning sessions for school children and evening broadcasts for general village audiences – and reached communities that had never before had access to television.
SITE’s impact was documented extensively. Evaluations found that instructional programmes were more popular than entertainment content, and that children improved language skills and gained knowledge beyond conventional classroom teaching. Farmers adopted new agricultural practices that required no additional expense. The project won UNESCO’s first Rural Communication Prize and, as noted by science fiction author Arthur Clarke on its 40th anniversary, was described as one of the greatest communication experiments in history.
Running simultaneously, the Kheda Communication Project (KCP), based in Gujarat’s Kheda district and managed by ISRO’s Development and Education Communication Unit (DECU), took a more locally grounded approach. Around 650 community television sets were distributed across 400 villages, owned by communities and maintained by the state government. What set Kheda apart was its participatory content production – local audiences were actively involved in creating programmes, making it a tested model for research-based, participatory development television that received worldwide recognition.
However, the story of Kheda also illustrates the political limits of development media. In 1985, when a high-powered commercial transmitter was commissioned in Ahmedabad, the government redirected the Kheda transmitter to Chennai to serve urban entertainment audiences – prioritising advertising revenue over rural development communication. It was, as Indian television historians have noted, a significant missed opportunity to replicate a proven community-based model.
The rise of alternative media
Mass media’s reach comes with a built-in problem: it broadcasts to everyone and listens to no one. This is where alternative media – also called community media or citizen’s media – fills a critical gap. Rather than reaching the largest possible audience with a uniform message, alternative media serves specific communities in their own languages, on their own terms, and often with their own hands on the microphone.
Community radio is one of the most powerful expressions of this model. Unlike commercial or public broadcasters, community radio stations are typically non-profit, locally governed, and deeply embedded in their communities. They don’t simplify lives into soundbites; they allow complexity to exist in familiar voices and languages. As one analyst put it, community radio remains one of the few truly accessible media platforms for communities without smartphones, internet access, or representation in mainstream media.
India’s community radio landscape reflects this diversity. Sangham Radio in Telangana, launched in 2008 by the Deccan Development Society, became India’s first all-women community radio station – run entirely by Dalit women who began producing programmes on sustainable farming, nutrition, seed sovereignty, and health. Radio Bundelkhand in Madhya Pradesh follows a participatory model where villagers, young girls, farmers, and local leaders are trained as reporters and help design programmes that reflect local needs. The station reaches over 400,000 people across 150 villages.
Alternative media’s importance extends beyond simply giving communities a platform. As researcher Jan Servaes has argued, citizen journalism and participatory media act as agents for social change, cultural development, and democratization. They dissolve barriers to information production, create space for alternative voices, and help build more active, aware communities. In doing so, they challenge the dominant discourses of mainstream media and expand what communication scholar Alfonso Gumucio Dagron called communities’ capacity for cultural pride and self-esteem.
Leveraging traditional media for development
Long before satellites or FM transmitters, communities across South Asia had their own sophisticated systems of communication: folk songs, puppetry, street theatre, oral storytelling, and ritual performance. These forms are not relics – they are living, trusted, and deeply effective channels for conveying complex social messages. Development communicators who recognized this potential learned to leverage them rather than replace them.
The Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), founded in 1943, was among the earliest organized efforts to use performing arts for social mobilization in India. IPTA brought together artists including Balraj Sahni, Kaifi Azmi, Ravi Shankar, and Salil Chowdhury to produce works addressing immediate social crises – including the devastating 1943 Bengal Famine, which inspired the landmark play Nabanna that doubled as a famine relief fundraiser. What made IPTA’s approach distinctive was its integration of folk traditions with contemporary social messaging. In Maharashtra, for instance, performers repurposed the tamasha – a traditional folk form featuring lavani songs and satire – to stage plays highlighting labour exploitation and famine conditions, delivered in vernacular Marathi to maximize community resonance.
In Kerala, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) – founded in 1962 and translating loosely as the Science Writers’ Forum of Kerala – developed one of India’s most celebrated models of communication for development. Beginning as a science literacy movement, KSSP expanded to use art and cultural media extensively to carry development messages to ordinary people. Its most iconic vehicle became the Kalajatha, or “Art Caravan” – an annual cultural procession from October 2 to November 7 that travels across Kerala performing street dramas, folk songs, skits, and traditional art forms in villages, towns, and schools. These Kalajatha campaigns have reached 60-70 million people and have addressed issues ranging from the commercialization of education to environmental destruction to women’s health. KSSP was also a major force behind Kerala achieving total literacy by 1991.
The effectiveness of traditional media in development communication comes down to trust and accessibility. A folk performance needs no electricity, no literacy, and no technical infrastructure. It arrives in a familiar form that audiences already love and understand. As researchers who evaluated KSSP note, the organization built on its understanding that science and technology are often monopolized by a privileged minority – and that arming people with knowledge through culturally resonant formats reverses that dynamic.
Mass, alternative, and traditional: a combined approach
The most effective development communication today does not privilege one media type over another. It recognizes that each serves a distinct purpose in reaching communities. Mass media is efficient for spreading critical information rapidly and widely – as demonstrated by national COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. Alternative media ensures local voices are heard and that communication is genuinely two-way. Traditional media reaches people who may be excluded by literacy barriers, technology gaps, or cultural distance from mainstream broadcasting.
What unites all three is a move away from passive reception toward active participation. Development communication is no longer about getting the right message to the most people. It is about ensuring that communities have genuine agency in identifying their own needs, generating their own knowledge, and choosing the media forms that best serve their realities. As Wikipedia’s overview of development communication notes, the FAO’s Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA) methodology – developed in the 1990s – formalized this shift by combining participatory tools with a strong communication focus to enhance project sustainability at the grassroots level.
What do you think? When mass media campaigns promote public health or education, do you think communities in rural or marginalized areas have enough say in how those messages are designed and delivered? And looking at India’s experience with SITE, Kheda, IPTA, and KSSP – what does it tell us about the relationship between political will and the long-term survival of development media projects?
References
- https://idrc-crdi.ca/sites/default/files/openebooks/306-2/index.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_communication
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Instructional_Television_Experiment
- https://studymasscomm.com/satellite-instructional-television-experiment-site/
- https://www.indianetzone.com/kheda_communication_project
- https://idronline.org/article/diversity-inclusion/tuning-in-community-radio-in-the-digital-age/
- https://thebetterindia.com/culture/community-radio-empowering-rural-india-11088685
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274224851_Participatory_Communication_for_Development
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_People's_Theatre_Association
- https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/kerala-sastra-sahitya/
- https://www.sociologydiscussion.com/society/functioning-and-working-of-kerala-sastra-sahitya-parishad-kssp/871
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/article/pii/S2590291121000528
Leave a Reply