Communication for Development and Social Change II: Corporatisation of Development and CSR, Non-State Actors and Mass Campaigns, Paradigms and Discourse of Development Communication, Global Civil Society and the Public Sphere, the Global Communication System and National Policies, and the Communicators of Social Reform in India

Development communication has passed through several overlapping paradigms, and the vocabulary of each is itself a discourse that frames what problems are and who must change. The modernisation-diffusion paradigm spoke of adoption and target groups. Social marketing, named by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman in 1971, applied the marketing mix to social causes, which is how contraceptives, oral rehydration salts and iodised salt were promoted. Entertainment-education, developed by Miguel Sabido in Mexican telenovelas in the 1970s and applied in India in Hum Log, embeds messages in popular drama. Behaviour change communication (BCC) and social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) combine interpersonal, community and mass media to change specific practices. The participatory paradigm and communication for development (C4D), UNICEF's term, stress dialogue, voice and empowerment. Rights-based approaches treat communication itself as a right.

Jürgen Habermas's public sphere (1962; English translation 1989) is the space between the state and private life where citizens debate matters of common concern on the basis of reason rather than status; he traced it to the coffee houses, salons and newspapers of eighteenth-century Europe and argued that commercial mass media later degraded it. Nancy Fraser (1990) replied that there were always multiple publics, including subaltern counterpublics of women, workers and others excluded from the bourgeois sphere. Global civil society extends the idea across borders: transnational NGOs such as Amnesty International (1961) and Greenpeace (1971), movements such as the protests at the World Trade Organization's Seattle meeting (1999) and the World Social Forum (first held in Porto Alegre in 2001), and networks enabled by the internet.

The global communication system has an old institutional core: the International Telegraph Union of 1865, now the International Telecommunication Union, allocates spectrum and satellite orbits; the Universal Postal Union dates from 1874; Intelsat (1964) created the first global satellite system; and a handful of Western news agencies long dominated international news. In the 1970s the Non-Aligned countries challenged this order: the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool was set up in 1976, UNESCO's MacBride Commission reported in 1980, and the call for a New World Information and Communication Order led the United States (1984) and the United Kingdom (1985) to leave UNESCO. The underlying tension is between the nation state's claim to sovereignty over communication within its borders and the universal principle, in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), of the freedom to seek, receive and impart information regardless of frontiers, which the Western powers read as a doctrine of the free flow of information.

National communication policies were promoted by UNESCO in the 1970s, with regional intergovernmental conferences such as the one at San José, Costa Rica, in 1976, as a way for developing countries to plan communication as part of development. India has never adopted a single comprehensive communication policy; it has sectoral policies instead: the broadcasting reports of Chanda, Verghese and Joshi, the Prasar Bharati Act 1990, the National Telecom Policies of 1994, 1999 and 2012, the National Digital Communications Policy 2018, and rules for print, cable, satellite channels and digital media. Internet governance adds a newer layer, with ICANN (1998) managing domain names and the UN's Internet Governance Forum (from 2006) providing multistakeholder dialogue.

Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) is often called the father of Indian journalism in the Indian languages. He published the Bengali weekly Sambad Kaumudi (1821) and the Persian weekly Mirat-ul-Akhbar (1822), and an English periodical, the Brahmunical Magazine. He used them to argue against sati, which was abolished in 1829, and for rational religion and women's rights, and he founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828. When John Adam's licensing regulations of 1823 required newspapers to obtain a licence, Roy and his associates petitioned against them, and he closed Mirat-ul-Akhbar rather than submit.

Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), educationist and four-time president of the Indian National Congress, was a journalist for much of his life. He edited the Hindi daily Hindustan of Kalakankar from 1887, founded the Hindi weekly Abhyudaya (1907), the English daily The Leader of Allahabad (1909) and the Hindi monthly Maryada (1910), and was later associated with the management of The Hindustan Times. He founded the Banaras Hindu University in 1916 and used the press to promote Hindi in the Devanagari script and national education.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) co-founded, with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar and others, the Marathi weekly Kesari and the English weekly Mahratta in 1881, and later ran them himself. Kesari carried his arguments for swaraj to a mass Marathi readership. He was prosecuted for sedition for articles in Kesari, in 1897 and again in 1908, when he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment, served in Mandalay. He also turned public festivals into mass communication, making the Ganapati festival (from 1893) and the Shivaji festival (from 1895) occasions for political gatherings, a use of traditional forms for modern mobilisation.

Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) communicated chiefly through institutions, books and pamphlets. With Savitribai Phule he opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848; he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and published Gulamgiri (Slavery) the same year and Shetkaryacha Asud (The Cultivator's Whipcord) in 1883, writing in plain Marathi for the oppressed castes and peasants. The Satyashodhak movement's weekly Deenbandhu, started in 1877 by Krishnarao Bhalekar and later edited by Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, carried its ideas and is counted among the first newspapers of the non-Brahmin movement.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) edited newspapers throughout his public life: Indian Opinion in South Africa (from 1903); Young India in English and Navajivan in Gujarati, both from 1919; and Harijan (1933) in English with its Gujarati and Hindi editions, Harijanbandhu and Harijan Sevak. His papers carried no advertisements and were meant to serve rather than to earn; he wrote that the sole aim of journalism should be service. He combined print with other channels: prayer meetings, marches such as the Dandi march (1930), fasts that were read as public messages, and symbols such as the charkha and khadi, which made him one of the most effective political communicators of the century.

Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982) edited the Marathi monthly Maharashtra Dharma from 1923, but his great communication method was the padayatra. The Bhoodan (land-gift) movement began on 18 April 1951 at Pochampally in Telangana, when a landowner offered land to landless villagers, and Bhave then walked across India for years asking landowners to give land to the landless, later extending the idea to Gramdan, the gift of whole villages. His campaign rested on interpersonal communication, public talks in villages and moral persuasion rather than mass media.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) founded a series of Marathi papers to give a voice to the untouched and excluded: Mooknayak (Leader of the Voiceless, 1920), Bahishkrit Bharat (Excluded India, 1927), Samata (1928), Janata (1930), renamed Prabuddha Bharat in 1956. He also led direct public actions that were themselves communication, such as the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927 for access to public water, and he wrote extensively in English for national and international audiences. Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) founded the monthly Rashtra Dharma (1947) and the weekly Panchjanya (1948) in Lucknow and set out his philosophy of Integral Humanism in lectures in 1965. Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967) founded the English journal Mankind and the Hindi journal Jan, which carried his socialist programme, his campaigns for Indian languages in public life, and his arguments on caste and gender equality.