AIR plans major push into left war zone with shanti geet, folk songs, welfare talk

The centre has decided to counter Left wing propaganda in Maoist and Naxalite affected areas with a radio broadcast programme riding on "Sanskar Geet," traditional folk songs centred around community welfare and peace in local languages and discourses by religious and spiritual personalities and content showing ill effects of violence in the most affected districts. This is part of the new content policy that it has come up with to help All India Radio reach out to people in 35 districts worst affected by Maoist and Naxalite violence. At present people in these areas that have no access to TV or newspapers and limited radio access. The new content relayed by six new high power transmitters will focus on promoting stories of government schemes to eliminate poverty, showing true stories of how violence has wrecked lives, interviews of law and order authorities in these areas, apart from programmes to promote local culture, sports and arts. Till now AIR in these areas had content only in Hindi or Telugu, largely film songs, but now there will be content in 30 tribal languages, including Bhojpuri, Maithili, Dhurvi, Dorli, Chhattisgarhi, Sindhi, Santhali, Desia , Mundari, Kurukh, Khariya , Ho and Bangla, besides other dialects and languages.

These decisions were taken in a high powered meeting on June 24 initiated by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi when chief secretaries of seven Naxal-hit states, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Telangana and Maharashtra came together. Nine secretaries of the central ministries participated in the meeting presided over by Home minister Rajnath Singh. The centre has now instructed the I& B ministry and Prasar Bharti to install new high power transmitters in six areas most affected by Left wing extremism. "The transmitters at Jagdalpur, Sambalpur, Bhawanaipatna, Jeypore, Vishakhapatnam and Hyderabad are still based on valve based old technology (and) will be now replaced by solid state transmitters. The centre has allotted a sum of Rs 32 crore for the project, to start with," an official said. High power transmitters in Patna and Ranchi have been replaced with solid state transmitters as part of the reach out efforts. Similarly, setting up of FM transmitters at Sukma, Jagdalpur, Narayanpur, Dantewda and Gaya has been submitted to the I & B ministry for which Rs 300 crore have been allotted, he added.

Weekly programmes are being designed on highlighting the "failings, misdeeds and exploitation of Naxalite groups and also the futility of extremism and violence, promotion of local arts, local folklore, sports, and interactive programmes based on telephone calls to increase participation of state functionaries," says the concept note designed for executing the policy. News based programmes to show how the world is moving forward, government's efforts to reach out to the poor and steps taken by the administration to intensify struggle against "anti-constitutional" elements will also be shown. "Most importantly, there are traditional songs and shanti geet in these areas that we want to record as part of our archives and broadcast on regular intervals," an officials said. "The point of these 15 minute programmes is to make the people there realise how futile violence is and make them turn to education and peace," an official said.