Radio to the Ryot

Old Mother India is too poor for radio. In the whole peninsula no sets are manufactured, and imported receivers are subject to heavy duties. But India's ryot (farmer) needs radio. He gets news only from bazaar gossip on market days, loses even that source when impassable roads through the four-month rainy season keep him home. So for three years All-India Radio (controlled by the Indian Government) has been trying to figure out a broadcasting scheme to enlighten rural India.

Obstacles to the scheme are many. A.I.R. has insufficient money for broadcasting, furnishing individual receivers, servicing them throughout India's 1,800,000 square miles. Polyglot India speaks 200 languages, assorted dialects of each.No one program would be universally understood. And lastly, Indians have the idea radio is a new device to boost taxes.

A borrowed transmitter and some receiving sets lent by Marconi Co. in 1935 made possible the first experiment in taking radio to the ryot. A.I.R. boldly chose for the experiment the turbulent Northwest Frontier, set up community sets, trumpeting Government propaganda. The villagers objected passionately, pegged rocks at the loudspeakers. That experiment was abandoned.

Last week the rural broadcasting scheme revived when the Government installed receiving sets in 120 villages of the 573-sq.-mi. Delhi district. Installed in village chowpals (clubrooms, usually a raised earthen platform some 50 feet square with a portico at one end), instruments are kept in locked rooms, loudspeakers installed out of reach. Each evening at sunset an automatic device switches on the sets, turns them off after one hour of blaring. Automatic operation is necessary to prevent ryots from damaging the sets either through ignorance or anger.*

Delhi broadcasts in Urdu and Hindi. And A.I.R. hopes for a lingua franca that would make broadcasts from Delhi understandable to all of India. Stuck with the job of making radio interest the ryot is India's Radio Chief Lionel Fielden. Dapper, dark-mustached, youthful Broadcaster Fielden came to Indian radio two years ago from Eton and Oxford by way of B.B.C. What the ryot likes is folk music, drama, dirty stories. What he gets from Etonian Fielden's programs is clean amusement and instruction. The instruction, however, has to be well disguised. Instead of lecturing the ryot on the use of fertilizer, Delhi broadcasts a farce in which Dulari, the peasant, becomes a millionaire. Dulari strikes it rich by spreading his fields with bone manure.

*In Central Australia, a more radio-wise part of the British Empire with a rural isolation problem, flying physicians go out on radio calls. Ranchers, farmers, miners have pedal radio transmitters, take exhausting rides on stationary bicycles to generate power for calling the doctor by radio.

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