Wireless in the Indian Village
The working of the project for establishing village listening-in stations in the Bombay Presidency will be watched with particular interest. Lord Dufferin, writing in the Spectator a fortnight ago, dwelt on the value of broadcasting as a means of reaching the largely illiterate rural electorate in India, and that is one of its most obvious uses. But radio is a particularly powerful instrument in a country where so small a proportion of the population can check the statements it hears by information drawn from the Press and elsewhere. It is natural and right that the Government should exercise considerable control over the new experiment. How far it should use it for purely governmental purposes is less easy to decide. Clearly at election times all suspicion of partisanship must be avoided, and even here, after ten years of broadcasting admirably managed, that difficult task has not been achieved to complete satisfaction. The new Government in Germany is using the wireless for an hour a night for its own ends, a- step which its political opponents bitterly and with some
reason resent.
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