Communication and National Development

Communication and National Development brings together fourteen essays by Professor P.C. Joshi, a leading social scientist and development thinker who explores here the interface between communication and development with special reference to India. The essays in the volume have a social science approach to communication as their unifying frame of reference. The long introduction and the epilogue try to present an integrated view of the main ideas, insights and observations on the subject from a historical perspective and in terms of its contemporary relevance. Development communication was central to public discourses during the anti-colonial struggle and the post-colonial nation-building project. It has re-emerged as a subject of national and international importance in the context of breath-taking leaps in communication technology and its vast potential for development (or maldevelopment). The author raises very pertinent questions in the realm of development communication as a sequel to the transition from state-directed planning to liberalisation and globalisation. Will communication revolution further accelerate the rich and poor, strong and weak, divide across and within countries in the twenty-first century? Will it help to realise the dream of "Many Voices One World" embodied in the UNESCO’s Mac-Bride Commission Report on communication? Or will it thwart this dream by eliminating plurality and re-establishing western cultural and economic hegemony? These are the concerns and anxieties voiced and examined in this volume. The essays presented here have taken shape in the course of intensive study and reflection combined with extensive field work and the widest possible interaction with experts from many fields as well as people from all walks of life. The value of the collection is enhanced by the extracts from major Communication Policy Reports and the seminal papers from some leading communication and development specialists reproduced in the appendices. The volume constitutes an indispensable reader and reference for students, teachers and researchers and also policy advisers and social activists in the field of development communication. It is written in a style which makes it useful for specialists as well as non-specialists.