How Community Radio Is Giving Rural Women The Voice They Never Had

Women’s access to and participation in the media has always remained a big question, especially in rural areas. But community radio is empowering rural women, as broadcasters and as listeners.

As I walked down the narrow road in a village in the Butwal region of Nepal, I looked around and all I could see were mud houses and women trying to finish one or the other tasks. It was not a new sight for me. It is a common sight in every nook and corner of India. And there I was, standing in the middle of the kuchcha road trying to ask women their experiences with Radio Mukti, a Community Radio station for women by women.

I recalled the day I was in a village in Orchha in the Bundelkhand region, same situation, same huts, different women, similar circumstances. This is a story made up of two stories; two levels where I found women participating in community radio (a local radio station, low power, medium reach, run mostly by a NGO or educational institute) in different capacities, struggling to find a space with limited prospects and unlimited challenges to face.

Picture this: a young girl aged 22 years struggles to move out of her comfort zone in order to create a space for herself in this big world. She describes her movement from being the rebel of the community to the idol many want to follow as one uphill task she undertook. It took her years but she loves what the movement brought to her. As a community broadcaster, she knew what the issues of the people around her were.

She was well aware of the struggles that were being faced at the local level. The community radio, she describes, “…came up as a ray of hope, for I wanted to do something and this was just the right platform.” When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men. The fact that she had no mother and she had the responsibility of brothers and sisters on her made her life tougher.

When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men.

She describes her daily routine thus: “I get up, cook for everyone, clean the house and then get out to work at the station. Earlier, no one valued what I was doing but when they heard my voice on the radio and saw me solving community problems, they started valuing my work. At home, I am the one bringing bread and outside, I am now recognized and respected. I struggled initially with technology and fieldwork but my passion made me persistent. The struggle in the past four years has been hard, but worth it. I feel confident and there is nothing that I am scared of now.”

As a community broadcaster, the Community Radio not only shaped her personality but her connection to the community people brought those grassroots issues to the table.

She is not just a story. She represents the story of many women I have met working in similar capacities at various radio stations, in India and in Nepal. The fact that women from different communities and villages are being represented in the media, their issues brought out, speaks for itself.  The names are varied, but the stories of women working in community radio have been similar.

The second story is a story of women at the listener level. My field visits tell me similar stories. I meet women in villages and slowly gather them for a discussion. In one of the visits in Gujarat, I can see how difficult it is for women to multi-task at home, in the farms, trying to accomplish any task left to their disposal. For me the challenge with women’s participation in media has always been ownership and access in homes to the technologies and access to mediums outside to take a stand and be a leader.

Women have always been the deprived gender. Even in the field of Media, the access and participation of women has been extremely limited. In the area of Community Radio, the issues of reach and ownership with respect to women have been challenged as it operates in the vicinity and movement is not a big question. While policies promote involvement of women in Community Radio, the reality is that it’s not as simple as it looks. Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Acting as a major information channel for women, a Community Radio station exists in their vicinity, is an immediate source of information, knowledge and at many instances hastens behavior change. It is interesting how every station that I have visited in India and Nepal includes at least one such woman broadcaster who has broken the shackles of the house, kept aside her challenges of literacy, has fought against all the barriers and has come out as a role model for women in the community.

She is the one who has moved beyond the unmarked yet known boundaries of the community territories, where she was once not even allowed to step out of the house. It’s an amazing sight – how technology has done what a lot of policies failed to do: include women.

With both men and women being keenly involved, I have always seen that the involvement of women has been beyond music and farming. They are the ones concerned about not just their children and the health of the house but are equally bothered about the rates of the vegetables they have grown, how to take care of animals, old age, health as well as issues of knowing their rights.

As a woman listener from one of the stations I visited remarked, “For us, the station is like the local activist who is not only giving us information and making us aware, but is also acting as a problem solver. Any issue we have, we call them and they give us information.. Sometimes, if we can’t go to the station, they come down and record our opinions and broadcast them…it’s empowering just listening to ourselves on the radio.”

For many who can’t read or write, or even understand any other language, the fact that the programmes a CR airs are made in their native language, by women like them, on issues that belong to them makes the station the sole source of information. One of the women from a station in rural Nepal once told me, “We don’t know what our rights are. Before the station came we did whatever was told to us, now we are trying to fight against wrong, we want to stand for ourselves and our children.” A community radio need not be all women, yet it reaches more women as they are the ones with access issues, to any form of technology, to any form of information.

Quoting Arundhati Roy, “There is no such thing as ‘voiceless’. There are only the ones deliberately silenced or preferably unheard”. I am a strong believer that through Community Radio as a medium of the masses in real, the idea of making the unheard come out and voice out their opinions is slowly coming to reality, especially for women.

This article was originally published at women' web by the author. 

Women, Contraception & Issues of Access-Usage-Rights

She was all of 22 year old. Four daughters already, two abortions done, I thought I should ask her how it felt to have been pregnant literally all the time since she had been married off. But before I could, her tear-filled eyes looked at me, her lips tried to (fake a) smile, and she said, “This is what women are born for after all. Isn’t it?” I had no answer.

It wasn’t literally that I had none. Somehow I could have used all my textbook based knowledge and my dose of empathy to make her understand that she was worth more than that. That she was powerful. That she was more than a baby-producing machine. That she had rights. But suddenly at that moment, I was completely numb. I had nothing to say. I realized how every system, every policy, every initiative, every organization had failed at that very moment for me.

Do I sound a little hopeless? I had to be. I had no other choice that moment. This issue was more complicated than it looked. What were the problems? Was it Patriarchy and Women’s Status? Or was it access to contraception? Decision making? Or Maternal Health Care? Male-heir desperation? What was it?

On my way back, her strong words kept on resonating in my mind and all I could feel was a sudden rush, an uncontrollable feeling of hatred towards society. People call me emotional with respect to my work. They say I should be more practical. But wasn’t the first reason I joined such a work force that I wanted my emotions to become a passion? I had a hundred thoughts and as the sun started setting, the cold breeze seemed to hit me harder than it usually did.

Issues of Family Planning go way beyond the number of babies. It encompasses the awareness of contraception, rights to make that choice on using one, it entails the issues of maternal and child care, it entails patriarchy and control over bodies, it involves issues of infection, HIV and Violence Against Women. It’s much more than contraception and incentives to get vasectomy or birth control. While the whole system in the country is working towards making people have  control over the production of babies, the lack of empathy has resulted in a flawed policy system where what we have reached today is a point on which we as citizens and humans are better off killing female fetuses and ignoring maternal health.

The fact remains that while an educated strong working urban woman is moving towards using contraception for her own sake, in an average Indian household (let’s not even discuss rural here) a woman still struggles to discuss contraceptive measures to be used by males. She will pop an i-pill or hormonal contraceptive pill rather than ask her husband to use condoms. Condoms have male ego attached to them.

So, when I asked that woman from a very economically progressive yet patriarchal town of a very rich state in India about her view on condoms and birth control, the blank look on her face made me wonder where we are all going wrong, in our struggle to make the country control the over-production of babies.

Questions remain: Will a woman show that she knows her contraceptives well? Will she tell her male counterparts that she is bothered about her health and so should he be? Will she go ahead and buy condoms for him to use? Will she be respected for her interest in use of condoms for birth control and also infections? Will a man value his partner’s opinion on contraception, let her choose what she wants rather than ego-stabbing his opinions on her? Will Contraception become more than a man’s decision and a choice that both take together? The point is that while men on the one hand expect to rule the woman, force her to do what he wants in bed, expecting an average Indian man to make balanced choices keeping his female counterpart in mind is going a little too far right now.

All this takes me back to my Physiology lessons where we did a project on Contraception in my B.Sc days and we explored the various methods and means, did we understand the theory and practicality to use them? The issues of negotiating, of decision making and of rights vs access are something that still remain untaught to women and men out there. Indians don’t appreciate talking about bedrooms publicly but somewhere the urgent need of the hour is to start talking about things as crucial as contraception, sex education, menstruation and pregnancy-childbirth-menopause.

Her eyes still haunt me when I see women like her around. And till date, I don’t have any answer to give to any woman who comes and asks me what to do to stop her husband from asking her to pull out baby boys from her uterus. I can never forget those eyes. Not until I find an answer, a solution.

This Post was originally published at Women's Web: http://www.womensweb.in/2014/01/women-contraception-usage-rights-india/