PARTICIPATORY COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT : GLOBAL EXPERIENCES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS IN INDIAN CONTEXT

Malik N and Singh BB

There is no universal development model, it is a process that differs society to society. Development is a relative term (Mody 1991). The road to development passes through grassroot participation. Communication and development are interwoven. Communication has the power to transform the society from the unsatisfactory situation to the situation which is humanly better. No national consensus or individual change can take place without dialogue; within groups pf people with public and planners. This implies horizontal communication within and between groups in which people are organized. This implies vertical, bottom-up, people to planner information flows on needs, priorities and preferred modes of meeting them. And it also include top-down, planner to people information flows in response to community information they receive.
Global experiences of participatory communication like, Association of Video in grassroot Movements of Brazil, National Film of Canada’s Challenge for Change Programme (CCP), ‘Books by the People’ Programme, Zambia’s experiments of community news papers, Chhatera experiment of ‘Hindustan Times’ etc. have proven the power of participatory communication for development. The essence of success of these experiments and other experiments lives in participation of people starting from needs identification to media utilization. Central idea of participatory communication moves around the pivot of people’s feeling of own self, that not only gives the benefit of technical information loaded on media but also empower the people, create confidence and tighten the social networking due to mass participation and personal touch.
The present paper is an attempt to analyse the lesson learned from global experiences of participatory communication for empowerment, concretization and self reliance and suggest their implications and strategies relevant in Indian context.

AgroTags: