Communication for Development and Social Change I: Concept and Definition of Development Communication, the Role of Media and Journalism, Indian Society and Specific Audiences, Development and Social Change, Post-Colonial Conceptions, and the Dominant Paradigm with its Critique

Any communication strategy for India starts from its demography and sociology. The Census of 2011 counted about 121 crore people; the literacy rate was 74.04 per cent (82.14 for men and 65.46 for women), the sex ratio 943 women per 1,000 men, and about 31 per cent of the population lived in urban areas. The Constitution's Eighth Schedule lists 22 languages, and the population is divided by region, religion, caste, class and the gap between village and city. Each division is also a communication gap: low literacy favours radio, television and folk forms over print; language diversity makes a single national message impossible; and caste and gender shape who owns a phone, who reads a paper and who speaks at a village meeting.

Communication in turn has demographic and sociological effects. Family-planning campaigns such as "Hum Do, Hamare Do" and the red triangle, the Pulse Polio campaign, and messages on institutional delivery and girls' education all sought to change behaviour measured in census and health data. Television serials changed aspirations and, some studies suggest, attitudes to women's autonomy; mobile phones changed migration, markets and political mobilisation. The sociological lesson is that media effects run through social structure: the same message is received differently by a landowner and a landless labourer, which is why the knowledge-gap hypothesis of Chapter 2 matters in India.

Social change is any alteration in social structure, relationships and values; development is change judged desirable and directed towards it. Newly independent states after 1947 took development as a national project. India chose planned development with a mixed economy under the Five-Year Plans, a Nehruvian model of industrialisation, science and state-led investment, alongside a Gandhian stream that valued village self-reliance, decentralisation and sarvodaya, the welfare of all. The question of who development is for, and on whose terms, runs through every post-colonial conception.

Dependency theory, from Latin America, answered modernisation directly. Andre Gunder Frank argued in 1966 that underdevelopment is not an original state but was produced by the same historical process that developed the metropolitan countries, "the development of underdevelopment"; Samir Amin, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, extended the analysis. Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory (1974) divided the world into core, semi-periphery and periphery. Later, the human-development approach measured development by people's capabilities rather than income: the UNDP's Human Development Index (1990), designed with Mahbub ul Haq, and Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (1999). The post-development critics, such as Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development (1995) and the authors of Wolfgang Sachs's The Development Dictionary (1992), questioned the idea of development itself as a Western discourse.

The dominant paradigm, which ruled from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, joined modernisation theory to a transmission view of communication. W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) described five stages every society would pass through: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption. Daniel Lerner (1958) argued that mass media spread empathy, the capacity to imagine oneself in new roles, which moved people from traditional to modern attitudes. Wilbur Schramm's Mass Media and National Development (1964) made media the "magic multiplier" of development and, with UNESCO, proposed minimum media standards: for every 100 people, 10 copies of daily newspapers, 5 radio receivers, 2 cinema seats and 2 television receivers. Rogers's diffusion of innovations supplied the method.

• Development measured as economic growth, in GNP per head.
• Capital-intensive, imported technology and industrialisation.
• Centralised planning by experts and the state.
• Top-down, one-way communication from government and media to the people.
• The causes of underdevelopment located inside poor societies: tradition, fatalism, lack of information.

By the mid-1970s the paradigm was failing on its own terms: growth did not trickle down, inequality widened, and media campaigns reached those already better off. Everett Rogers's own essay "Communication and Development: The Passing of the Dominant Paradigm" (1976) conceded the point. From Latin America, Luis Ramiro Beltrán criticised the "alien premises, objects and methods" that North American research imposed on the region, and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in 1968, in English in 1970) replaced the "banking" model, in which experts deposit knowledge in passive learners, with dialogue and conscientisation (conscientização), the growth of critical awareness through reflection and action.

The critiques converged on a few biases. The pro-innovation bias assumed every innovation should be adopted and ignored reasons for rejecting it. The individual-blame bias blamed the non-adopter's ignorance or fatalism rather than the system that denied him credit, land or water. The one-way flow ignored local knowledge. In India, Prakash Shingi and Bella Mody's work on agricultural television described a "communication effects gap", in which information widened rather than narrowed differences between richer and poorer farmers. SITE's evaluations raised similar concerns, while the Kheda Communication Project in Gujarat, which involved villagers in making programmes about their own problems, pointed to an alternative.

The responses produced alternative paradigms. "Another development", in the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation's report What Now (1975), called for development that is need-oriented, endogenous, self-reliant, ecologically sound and based on structural transformation. The participatory paradigm made communities the authors of their own development and communication, through community media, participatory video and dialogue. Jan Servaes's multiplicity paradigm held that there is no universal path and that each society must define development for itself. These ideas lead directly into the discourse of development communication taken up in Chapter 5.