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Media Research and Public Policy: Tiding Over the Rupture
Introduction
This chapter engages with the conflicting relations between media research and public policy in India. It follows the trajectory of “policy-making in communications” as well as the “history of communication research” in universities in India. In doing so, we find a lack of fit between the two. We question the discursive formation by analyzing the forms of expertise and knowledge practices that were being constituted in the post-liberalization period along with the entry of new stakeholders in the field. The chapter emphasizes the need for conceiving of and operationalizing an intense dialogue between higher education and policy-making bodies, so as to highlight the lessons to be learned from experiences in India and elsewhere.
Policy-making in the domain of media in India has always been a site where competing interest groups were at loggerheads. Several such encounters were observed in the century before 1947. While colonial governmentality sought to reconstitute the public sphere, native public opinion, itself highly layered, incessantly questioned the colonial covenant (Kalpagam 2002; Das 2005). Early newspapers, telegraphy, and cinema were the obvious playing fields of the colonial government. This was complemented by the streamlining of traditional networks of communication, from the village upwards, to institutionalize the management of “information” (Bailey 1993). ...
