Now the Time for Community Television in Bangladesh

Community radio movement has been started since 2000. After a long journey with advocating and lobbying with the government line departments, organizing a numbers of awareness raising meetings, mass gatherings and seminars, and finally, the present government has approved and given permission to 14 community radio stations for broadcasting its programs. It is no doubt a great admirable job of the present government. It is to be noted that the agenda was included in the election manifesto of Awami league.

Community radio is a successful step to “Right to Information”. Now is the time, we can start for Community Television. The mainstream Television channels are now captured by the national and multinational corporate agencies and they are mostly busy for business and advocating for their own initiators where marginalized and deprived peoples’ agenda are neglected. So we need Community Television immediately to change this situation and focusing the needs, views, struggles of marginalized people and to show them for solving their problems by their own.

It could be an issue as the community radio is a new intervention and still it is in testing mode so how can we think for community television at this stage? Is it relevant?

The fact is this that after struggling on this issue for last twelve years, we have convince the government and get permission for start broadcasting of community radio. So if we don’t start thinking and planning on this issue, then it will not be possible for us to start telecasting community television before the golden jubilee of our great national victory. We want to start Community television telecasting before the golden jubilee. Community television will not be a competitor of the main stream television but it will be a supplement media.

Community television can be started with a few numbers of equipments. Community television is as like as the community radio, very simple equipments and a few numbers of staffs can run a community television. At present community television could be run locally with the help of cable line operators.  But we expect that the government will permit them for community-based telecasting service and give them terrestrial license in the near future.

The number of television channels in Bangladesh is not sufficient comparing the number of population.  And telecasted programs are almost the same with the main stream televisions where the news of marginalized people is ignored. Some channels telecasted district level local news as bulletin, and it is not sufficient to cover the community level.

Why Community television?

Community television can communicate with the communities effectively and directly. Community television will be more powerful and popular than the community radio because people can hear and watch the events. The participation in this activity will be higher than the community radio.  People can rely more on community television programs as they can only listen the development related programs through community radio thus they will relate them with this intervention. Community television could make this easy access for the community. However, the challenge of running community television is collecting the equipment and skill manpower. 

The function of Community television is technically critical so it needs skill manpower than the community radio. Nothing is impossible so we do have time to kill. For example- From  2007 Nepal has started  community television successfully. So we believe our dream for community television is not an easy achievable but not a nightmare. We have confident that our dream will be in reality.