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In the past 25 years, India has seen an explosion of “e-solutions” intended to “solve” issues related to health, education, and poverty. Business corporations and governmental and nongovernmental organisations (NGO), in varying degrees of collaboration with each other, have introduced myriad information and communication technology (ICTs) projects to rural and urban areas to induce “development.” In a rather alarming echo of a Lerner-esque (Lerner, 1958) notion of progress, a trickling down of technology continues to be hailed as an answer. Its enthusiastic cheerleaders emphatically state that increasing accessibility will empower users. However, past experience has taught us that while access to technology can enable users, it always occurs in contexts layered with power relations. It follows then that an introduction of media technologies tends to reconfigure these relations of power–some in subtle ways and others more overtly.

It has been nearly 12 years since the Indian government legalised the provision of community radio licences to NGOs, facilitating platforms for the production and consumption of community radio shows via both narrowcasting and broadcasting. It might be a useful exercise at this time to understand how access might have translated on the ground. How are the capacities of the community interacting with these different media technologies “amplified”(Ash, 2012a) or dampened? Further, we need to explore how they may have complicated existing power relations (eg gender, caste, and class relations) or new ones that have been introduced.