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Culture & Society

A new kind of radio: FM broadcasting in India

Biswarup Sen
Media Culture Society published online 26 August 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0163443714544998

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MCS0010.1177/0163443714544998Media, Culture & SocietySen

Article

Media, Culture & Society

A new kind of radio:

1­–16
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DOI: 10.1177/0163443714544998
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Biswarup Sen
University of Oregon, USA

Abstract
In 2001, India’s first private FM station – Radio City, Bangalore – came on air, ending an
era of state broadcasting that began in 1930. In the past decade, FM radio has enjoyed
spectacular success: over 200 stations are now in operation, and the FM industry
has seen spectacular growth in listenership and revenues. FM’s impact goes beyond
economics; it is now a cultural signifier synonymous with modernity – as the ‘tagline’
for a popular FM network puts it ‘Radio Mirchi – it’s hot!’
FM, I argue in this article, represents a new kind of radio. The shift from state-
controlled, nationwide AM transmission to corporate-owned local FM broadcasting
signals a profound change in the very philosophy of radio in India. This article offers a
brief account of the history of Indian radio and analyzes the social and economic factors
that necessitated a change in modes of broadcasting. It also brings its claims into focus
through using a case study that looks at the business structure, programming policies,
and audience management strategies of one very popular FM station – Radio Mirchi,
Kolkata – in order to demonstrate how these newly shaped practices are reinventing
the role of radio in contemporary India.

Keywords
broadcasting, FM, India, liberalization, media, radio

‘Good Morrrning Mumbai’

In the hit Bollywood romantic comedy Lage Raho Munnabhai (‘Carry On Munnabhai,’
Rajkumar Hirani, 2006) the lead character – an affable small-time gangster named
Munnabhai – turns on his radio to catch a morning talk-show program. Munna is smit-
ten with what he hears, as the film’s website colorfully puts it ‘Munna is in love…with

Corresponding author:
Biswarup Sen, University of Oregon, 200 Allen Hall, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.
Email: bsen@uoregon.edu

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2 Media, Culture & Society 

the voice of popular radio jockey Jhanvi. Her effervescent greeting of “Good Morrrning
Mumbai” on her daily radio show makes Munna’s heart skip a beat each time he listens
to her.’ Munna eventually manages to win over Jhanvi’s heart, but the film’s ending is
quite unexpected: not only does Munna renounce his criminal lifestyle; he becomes a
radio jockey himself! Munna’s passionate identification with radio is clearly in excess
of what the plotline demands, and it takes us beyond the tumultuous affairs of the heart
to the frenetic business of mass communications. Lage Raho is interesting because it is
a love story twice over, a heart-warming screen romance featuring Munna and Jhanvi,
and also a tale about India’s current obsession with a particular type of broadcasting –
FM radio.
FM broadcasting in India is a recent phenomenon. The technology was introduced in
1977, but the FM era properly began in 2001 when India’s first private station – Radio
City, Bangalore – went on the air. Since then, radio has enjoyed a remarkable boom. As
of February 2013, there were 266 private FM stations in 87 cities (BECIL, 2013) and
plans are currently under way for licenses to be granted for another 839 stations that will
operate in nearly 300 new locations (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 2013).
In the period 2007–2011, market penetration in the three major metropolitan centers of
Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai grew from 71% to 87%, 59% to 88%, and 51% to 70%,
respectively (TAM Media Research, 2011). Revenues are on the rise as well, growing
from $200 million to $250 million in the period 2010–2012 (Broadcast&CableSat,
2013). And, according to a recent report, radio is expected to outpace all other media in
the next four years with a compounded aggregate growth rate (CAGR) of approximately
20%, compared to 17% for television, 15% for music, 10% for film, and 9% for print
(Jagran, 2013). Perhaps more significantly, FM programming has become an ‘in thing,’
synonymous with youth culture and modern lifestyles. As one commentator puts it:

FM programmes are catchy, fast and brash and in general carry a mood of casualness and
informality. In the metropolitan cities, FM programmes are a craze in paan shops [tobacco
stands] and small retail outlets, snack bars, city buses and taxis. Nobody takes FM seriously and
yet everyone listens to it. (Mounir, 2008)

In view of its current popularity, one must ask why FM radio took so long to come to
India. In the United States, for example, FM broadcasting began as early as 1941, and
had, by 1966, become the fastest-growing sector in the industry (Sterling and Keith,
2008: 101–127). FM broadcasting in India, on the other hand, began to really take hold
only at the beginning of the new millennium. What accounts for this extraordinary
60-year lag? By addressing the question of FM’s belatedness, this article seeks to shed
light on a crucial component of India’s contemporary media landscape. While several
significant works (Chakravarty, 1993; Ganti, 2012; Gopal, 2011; Kumar, 2005; Mankekar,
1999; Mehta, 2008; Prasad, 1998; Rajagopal, 2001) have studied the globalization of
Indian media and its cultural effects though cinema and television, the rise of FM radio,
though coeval with the growth of these other media, has remained woefully under-
investigated. The extant work on radio (Awasthy, 1965; Baruah, 1983; Chatterjee, 1991;
Lelyveld, 1994; Pendakur, 2004) is largely concerned with the role it played in nation-
building, and focuses almost solely on the era of state broadcasting that preceded the rise

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Sen 3

of FM. An inquiry into radio’s current phase will supplement the work done on cinema
and television and thus provide a fuller understanding of the transformations in India’s
media ecology in the globalized era. If the study of radio in the nationalist era helps us
understand the nature of statist mass media, and that of cable television and Bollywood
illustrates the shift to a culture industry, then an analysis of FM broadcasting enables us
to see the changes in communicative processes in the post-digital age. FM, as we shall
see, exemplifies the ‘new mediatization’ of an older form of communication by virtue of
its emphasis on narrowcasting, its individuated form of address and its receptiveness to
audience input and feedback.
The article consists of three sections. The first section provides a brief historical
account of radio in India before the advent of FM. For the greater part of the twentieth
century radio was seen as an essential tool for nation building, thus broadcasting was
placed exclusively in the hands of government. This ‘AM phase’ succeeded in building
a vast mass audience for radio, and had little use for a technology as small-scale as FM.
However, by the end of the twentieth century, AM’s appeal and usefulness had begun to
fade. In the second section of the article, I examine the reasons that led to the decline of
AM broadcasting and simultaneously facilitated the rise of FM. The three main factors
here were the liberalization of the economy in the early nineties, the dramatic impact of
television on popular culture in the period 1980–2000, and the rise of a large consumer
class conversant with globalized forms of entertainment. The third and concluding sec-
tion of the article consists of a case study of one FM station – Radio Mirchi, Kolkata.
Based on extended interviews with station personnel, analysis of the station’s organiza-
tional structure, operational practices and programming content, and on informal surveys
of audience members, the section brings to light the salient features that characterize
Indian radio today.1 The article as a whole tries to address the puzzle concerning FM’s
late arrival in India by contending that FM represents a new kind of radio that utilizes old
technology in order to generate a contemporary and novel mode of communication.

A brief history of Indian radio

For the entire course of the twentieth century, radio broadcasting in India was governed
by the idea that its purpose was to ‘Produce and transmit varied programmes designed to
awaken, inform, enlighten, educate, entertain and enrich all sections of the people’ (All
India Radio, 2013). Such a vision justified control over the airwaves, and both the British
colonial government and its Indian successors in the post-independence period decided
that broadcasting was the sole prerogative of the state. This era of state broadcasting
(roughly 1930–2000) was ‘nationalist’ at the levels of organization, infrastructure, and
content. Broadcasting policies were formulated in the capital by the Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, while officials recruited from a vast pool of career bureau-
crats ran day-to-day operations. Decisions regarding capital investment and technology
adoption were guided by a developmentalist mindset that sought a broadcasting infra-
structure capable of serving the entire nation. The adoption of medium wave AM
broadcasting – with its reach of up to 500 miles – made sense in this context and by the
end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1974) the country’s radio network had 70 stations that
provided medium-wave service to 80% of the population (Baruah, 1983: 18). Broadcasting

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4 Media, Culture & Society 

content was also overtly nationalist: programming largely consisted of reportage of gov-
ernmental accomplishments in the areas of growth and development, educational talks
aimed at the young, the urban and rural poor, and ‘light entertainment’ that would uplift
listeners without diverting them from the obligations of citizenship. Not surprisingly,
such a project faced growing challenges from market forces as well as evolving pubic
tastes and had, by the end of the century, exhausted all its appeal and potential.
The history of Indian broadcasting began in the colonial period when the first station
of the Indian Broadcasting Company (IBC) went on air on July 23, 1927. The IBC proved
unprofitable and was taken over by the colonial government in 1930. It was renamed as
the Indian Broadcasting Service, and restructured in the image of the British Broadcasting
Corporation. Under the dynamic stewardship of Lionel Fielden – an ex-employee of the
BBC – the organization would soon become one of the world’s largest broadcasting sys-
tems. Fielden was also responsible for persuading the colonial government to rechristen
the IBS as All India Radio (hence abbreviated AIR), a name by which it has been known
ever since. Fielden’s real contribution lies in the fact that he was an ambassador for one
of two competing visions about what broadcasting should be. The first, associated with
the colorful figure of David Sarnoff, saw radio as a commodity operating within a free
market that brought pleasure to individual consumers, and profits to the owners. Sarnoff
outlined this perspective very succinctly in his famous Radio Music Box Memo where
he stated ‘I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a “household
utility” in the same sense as the piano or phonograph’ (1916). This view was in stark
contrast to one voiced by John Reith, the BBC’s legendary founder. In this alternative view
– the one that was to be wholeheartedly adopted by Fielden in the Indian subcontinent
– radio was a social instrument in the hands of responsible authorities, the audience was
a collective joined in a body politic, and content was to be determined not by the criterion
of popularity but that of benefit (Reith, 1949).
The colonial model had three main features that would characterize Indian broadcast-
ing for many years to come: total state jurisdiction over radio, a bias towards centralized
programming at the expense of the regional and local, and a paternalistic philosophy that
believed that the audience was better off with programming ‘from above.’
Firstly, all broadcasting was placed firmly under state control. In the colonial period,
All India Radio functioned under the auspices of the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, an arrangement that would continue after Independence. This practice led
to a peculiar anomaly: while print journalism enjoyed absolute freedom of expression in
post-colonial India, broadcasting (radio and later television) remained under the tutelage
of the state.2 Secondly, broadcasting policy was governed by an expansionist and total-
izing logic that prioritized the national over the regional and local. This logic had been
set in place in the colonial period. Preparing for his trip to India, Fielden noticed with
some alarm that the Government of India Act gave free rein to the Provinces and Princely
States in the matter of broadcasting. This laissez-faire approach went against the entire
tenor of Fielden’s BBC heritage:

Every Government and every Prince could cash in on the new medium. And how! Every State
would have its Luxembourg, its jazz or Indian equivalent, its advertisement racket, its playing-
down-to-the lowest-common-factor-of-taste. Unless Indian broadcasting, could, within the

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Sen 5

next year or two, acquire, so to speak, an All India Personality, which would hold it together,
something of that kind was bound to happen. (Fielden, 1950: 145)

Fielden’s observations about the nature of narrowcasting precisely anticipate the form
FM was to take many decades later and help us understand why such a mode of address
would be anathema to a centralized colonial state. His intent of giving radio an ‘All-India
Personality’ was strenuously pursued in the post-independence period by BV Keskar, the
Minister of Information and Broadcasting from 1952 to 1961. Keskar literally personi-
fied statist ideology: dictatorial in style, he initiated an aggressive campaign of expan-
sion, consolidation, and top-down cultural education that sought to homogenize Indian
broadcasting. The most blatant expression of such a tendency was the launching of a
‘Medium Wave Plan’ that would enable the airing of a National Programme originating
in the capital and relayed by all regional stations. Though it stifled the growth of regional
and local radio, the move to nationwide AM broadcasting was very much in line with the
Indian state’s commitment to a highly centralized planned economy as embodied in suc-
cessive Five Year Plans. This mode of governance was characterized by a paternalistic
elitism that saw itself as a moral and uplifting force crucial for the nation’s development
and well-being, hence Keskar’s unilateral decision to ban film music from the airwaves
on the grounds that it was a vulgar form of art. This move was highly unpopular and the
Indian listening public deserted All India Radio in favor of Radio Ceylon, a commercial
radio station broadcasting out of Colombo. The government realized its mistake, and in
1957 it set up a channel – Vividh Bharati – that would exclusively broadcast Hindi film
music and lighter forms of entertainment. Even though state radio would enjoy two fur-
ther decades of prosperity, this early defeat at the hands of market forces and consumer
demand was a portend of things to come.
Radio was undoubtedly the single most important mass medium in India in the early
years after Independence. This period also saw a robust growth in the newspaper and
magazine industries, but the high percentage of illiteracy – the literacy rate was a mere
18% in 1951 and had reached only 64% as late as 2001 (National Literacy Mission,
2012) – meant that radio’s crucial role in mass communications remained unchallenged.
Though the introduction of television in 1969 began to diminish radio’s status with the
urban middle classes, it continued to have a very large constituency amongst the rural
poor. Over the years, this monolithic arrangement was forced to make successive conces-
sions to consumer demand and market forces, even though entertainment content
remained the preserve of the state. In 1967, Vividh Bharati became the first Indian radio
channel to carry commercials. In 1968, the Yuv Vani (Voice of Youth) channel, that fea-
tured informal programming, was introduced to try to capture the growing youth market.
Then followed a period of inaction during which television, still a relatively new medium
at that time, became the main focus of governmental initiatives. Though FM broadcast-
ing began in 1977, in Chennai, it was a low-key operation until All India Radio decided
to lease out its dormant FM channels to private media companies in 1993, almost imme-
diately after the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991–1992. The personal histo-
ries of two employees at Radio Mirchi – the leading FM station in the city of Kolkata
(formerly Calcutta) – give us an intriguing glimpse into the evolution of the industry in
its early days. Both Indrani Chakrabarti (Programming Controller) and Ribhu Mullick

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6 Media, Culture & Society 

(producer) joined the station in 1990s when it was known as Times FM and broadcasting
through a lease agreement with All India Radio. As Chakrabarti recalls, the station would
air for only four hours a day, paying AIR a license fee for the rights.3 The popularity of
FM radio shot up after the introduction of private broadcasting, but to everyone’s sur-
prise the government pulled the plug on this arrangement in 1998 (Kohli-Khandekar,
2006: 173). However, the forces pushing for privatization were too strong. Times FM
continued as an operation even after it stopped broadcasting. Mullick recalls that though
the ‘station’ was not broadcasting any content it continued to employ around 15 employ-
ees who worked on what was called ‘General Productions.’4 What this seemingly odd
decision tells us is that the Times Group management was sanguine about the inevitabil-
ity of private FM broadcasting and thus decided to keep its operations running and ready
for the moment the government relented. This strategy paid off, and in March 2000, the
government of India held an open auction for the licensing of 108 private radio licenses,
ushering in a new era in Indian radio.

From AM to FM
The FM revolution in India is a striking instance of an old medium reinventing itself in
the face of major shifts in culture and society. AM radio broadcasting, as we saw, was
state-controlled, national in scope and run as a public sector undertaking in order to pro-
mote national integration and create an informed citizenry. The advent of FM signaled
much more than a change in mere technology, it presented a new philosophy of radio that
marked a radical break with 70 years of broadcasting practice. In this new regime, radio
stations were under private ownership, local in terms of transmission, and run as
profit-and-loss centers answerable to investors and shareholders. Moreover, by rethink-
ing the notions of entertainment and audience, FM offered an alternative vision concern-
ing the role of radio in contemporary India. How did such a momentous transformation
come about? I would like to point to three distinct though inter-related factors that led to
this sea change: the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s; developments in
television broadcasting during the period 1980–2000; and the spread of a market culture
that redefined the nature of listening and consumption.
As is well known, the foreign exchange crisis of 1991 triggered a set of actions that
would transform the nature of the Indian economy The measures enacted by the central
government included a readjustment of the exchange rate to link it more realistically to the
global market, removal of trade controls, a dismantling of the industrial licensing system,
free access to imports, reform of the public sector including gradual privatization, and the
removal of restrictions on multinational corporations and foreign investment. Liberalization
was India’s equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall: it effectively ended a 44-year-old
experiment with a socialistic ‘mixed model’ and reintegrated the country’s economy into
the global capitalist order. The consequences of this for broadcasting were twofold. First,
the expansion and legitimization of private industry created a climate in which it was pos-
sible to argue against the government’s exclusive suzerainty over the airwaves. A dispute
between the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the government surrounding the
broadcasting rights for a cricket match resulted in the historic 1995 judgment of the Indian
Supreme Court that ruled that the broadcast media ‘should be under the control of the

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Sen 7

public as distinct from Government,’ and ordered the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting ‘to take immediate steps to establish an autonomous public authority… to
control and regulate the use of the airwaves.’ (Mehta, 2008: 188–119) The ruling gave
birth to powerful coalition between judicial activists, corporate lobbyists, and members of
the general public that would challenge and eventually remove the government’s sole
authority over broadcasting. The airwaves would now be open for private investment,
especially for those corporations that were sufficiently capitalized to be able to enter a
new and unproved market. It is no surprise, therefore, that most of the licenses for FM
stations in the early rounds of bidding were awarded to highly-capitalized media compa-
nies (The Times of India Group, The India Today Group) or giant conglomerates that were
seeking to enter the radio market (Reliance, Virgin Group).
The evolution of Indian television from the 1980s onwards would also play a signifi-
cant, if indirect, role in the reinvention of Indian radio. Television broadcasting started in
1959, and during the next two decades it largely consisted of news, educational shows,
content showcasing government achievements, and limited entertainment programming.
Two events – the introduction of color transmission on the occasion of the 1982 Asian
Games and the televising of the 1983 cricket World Cup – gave a huge boost to its popu-
larity. Thus, the number of active television transmitters in the country shot up from 35
to 100 within a couple of years and had by 1990 crossed the 400-mark (Subramanayam,
2009). The public’s growing appetite for television no doubt influenced Doordarshan
(the government agency that was the equivalent of All India Radio) to reconsider its
broadcasting philosophy. Hence the decision to increase entertainment content – like the
immensely popular soap opera Hum Log – that was commercially sponsored as well as
the airing of hugely popular religious epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Owing
to the success of Doordarshan’s programming during the 1980s, television became a
glamorous medium with a constituency that was primarily urban, middle-class and
upwardly mobile. Given this development, it was no surprise that the privatization of
television began even before the Supreme Court decision of 1995. In fact, Indian audi-
ences got their first taste of private broadcasting the very year liberalization came into
effect. The precipitating event was the government’s decision to allow CNN to broadcast
its coverage of the first Gulf War. This concession ‘opened up the skies’: the same year
saw the setting up of a five-channel satellite service provided by the Hong Kong-based
Star TV (now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation). The first private Indian
network – Subhash Chandra’s ZEE-TV – came on air a year later in 1992. The Supreme
Court decision therefore merely made into law what had already been established de
facto. The wave of privatization has continued unabated since then, and as of 2012 there
were 825 television channels in operation owned by both major organizations like Star,
Zee, Sony, CNN, and CNBC, as well as smaller regional and local companies
(Indiantelevision.com, 2012). In short, television provided a model for changing from a
statist to a privatized medium and for a more consumer-driven mode of entertainment
that radio could easily emulate.
The emergence of a new consumer culture was the third and final factor behind the
FM revolution. The expansion of the Indian economy after liberalization led to a signifi-
cant increase in the size of the middle class, especially in urban areas. According to one
analyst, between 1989 and 1999, the proportion of urban middle class households almost

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8 Media, Culture & Society 

doubled, and current estimates for the size of this group range between 150 and 300 mil-
lion (Sridharan, 2004). This increase led to a concomitant growth in consumption, which
by 2006 accounted for 64% of India’s GDP compared to 58% for Europe, 55% for Japan,
and 42% for China (Das, 2006: 6). Between 1985 and 1995, for example, the percentage
of households that owned black-and-white TV sets rose from 4.7 to 24% (Deshpande,
2003: 137). By the end of the century, urban India at least was decidedly consumerist and
home to a growing middle class that was desirous of global modes of entertainment.
I have argued so far that the liberalization of the Indian economy, the changes in
media policies, and the rise of a middle-class consumer culture created an environment
that allowed for the transformations in Indian radio at the beginning of the new millen-
nium. In the remainder of this article I focus on one particular radio station – Radio
Mirchi, Kolkata – in order to highlight features of FM broadcasting that illustrate this
transformation and account for its current popularity. I have chosen this molecular
approach of studying only one station on the following grounds. First, Radio Mirchi is
the highest-rated station in a major metropolis, and is thus a good representative of FM
stations in general. Secondly, the station is part of a highly centralized network that
broadcasts in 32 Indian cities and towns. Since broadcasting practices are replicated
across stations in the network, findings from the Kolkata station can shed much light on
the nature of FM at a more macro level. Finally, a single case study allows for a fine-
grained analysis that can catch the more nuanced aspects of the phenomenon under
investigation in a manner that a study with a larger scope may not be able to.

Radio Mirchi: a case study

With an extended metropolitan population of over 14 million, Kolkata has 16 FM sta-
tions. Of these, nine are commercial ventures, three are non-profit, and the rest are oper-
ated by All India Radio. Radio Mirchi, Kolkata came on the air in May 2003 and was
among the first four private radio stations in the city. In the past 10 years, it has been
consistently ranked as the top station in the Kolkata metropolitan area. As of 2012, it held
a 23.3% market share –with its nearest competitors Big FM and Friends FM holding
shares of 17.9% and 14.9%, respectively (Radioandmusic.com, 2012). The station’s ori-
gin goes back to the period when AIR leased out FM bandwidth to private broadcasters.
Its parent company – The Times of India Group – was one such lessee and operated a
channel known as TimesFM that was highly popular. When the Indian government
decided to issue licenses for private FM broadcasting in 2000, the Times Group won the
largest number of frequencies and started operations under the brand name Radio Mirchi.
The network’s first station aired in 2001 and it now includes 32 stations located all across
the country with a combined listenership of over 41 million (Entertainment Network
(India) Limited, 2013). The success of the Kolkata franchise is not unique – the Mirchi
stations in Bangalore and Mumbai are second in their respective markets, while the Delhi
counterpart comes in at third. In short, Radio Mirchi is a high-performing FM station run
by an equally successful network. It is thus a legitimate representative of the rise of FM
in India. In what follows I examine four of the station’s key aspects – ownership, organi-
zation, audience, and programming – in some detail in order to shed light on the nature
of FM broadcasting in contemporary India.

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Sen 9

The Radio Mirchi network vies with Big FM for being the largest radio setup in the
country. It is owned by a company called Entertainment Network (India) Limited (ENIL),
which in turn is held and promoted by Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited (BCCL).
BCCL – a venerable concern established in 1838 – is part of the Times of India Group
which is India’s largest media conglomerate and bills itself as ‘the largest publishing
company in India and South-Asia . . . with a turnover exceeding a billion dollars . . . [and]
over 25,000 advertisers, 11,000 employees and an audience spanning across all conti-
nents’ (The Times of India Group, 2013). The Times Group has interests spanning all
forms of media: newspapers, radio, television, digital services including mobile and
internet traffic, music, movies, syndication, and event management.
This model of ownership whereby a local station is nested within a very large eco-
nomic concern is characteristic of the FM industry in general. Thus Mirchi’s biggest
competitor in Kolkata – Big FM – is one of the 45 stations in the Big FM network run by
Reliance Broadcast Network Limited – one of India’s largest media and communications
companies. RBNL in turn is part of the Reliance Group, a huge conglomerate with a
market capitalization of $15 billion (Reliance, 2011). These ownership patterns tell two
important stories. First, they show that in the age of convergence the era of the single-
medium industry is effectively over – in India and elsewhere. Thus ENIL (the company
that runs the Radio Mirchi network) has a second avatar – Alternate Brand Solutions –
that offers ‘Experiential Marketing and Below the Line Solutions’ under Brand 360 and
owns media properties like Ford Super Model, Teen Diva and the Spell Bee contest. In
other words, FM is far less ‘local’ than it appears on first sight – while it may not be
‘nationalist’ in the way All India Radio was, industry logic subjects it to a mode of
organization whose scope is nationwide, if not global.
This paradox points to a central problem in media studies: how does one understand
the specificity of the ‘local’ given that it is embedded within the ever-expanding general-
ity of national and global capital? The organizational structure of Radio Mirchi, Kolkata
may give us a few initial clues as to how we may go about answering this difficult ques-
tion. As far as staffing goes, ‘local’ means that personnel are drawn mainly from Kolkata,
but more importantly, it also translates into ‘small.’ In view of the station’s popularity,
personnel size is surprisingly streamlined. At the top is the Station Head who oversees
three departments – Programming, Marketing, and Sales. The Programming unit consists
of a head, a controller, and a small creative team. The marketing and sales divisions are
also sparsely staffed, and at the time of writing the station employed seven deejays (or
RJs as they are called in India). These numbers are in stark contrast to All India Radio’s
Kolkata station, which despite its vastly reduced market share continues to employ over
200 people (All India Radio, Kolkata, 2013). Radio Mirchi can afford to be small because
of its programming strategy: for the first eight years of its existence the station restricted
itself to playing music, and only very recently has it ventured into other types of content.
The exclusive emphasis on music enables a top-down style of operations. Thus, local
disc jockeys have no control whatsoever over what they play. As RJ Deep, one of Mirchi’s
most popular deejays, told me ‘The playlist is completely decided by headquarters – they
construct it by vetting an audience and mail it in to individual stations a day before it is
aired.’5 The smallness of the station has less to do with its being local than with the fact
that it exists purely as a purveyor of music. Since all the FM stations have an obsessive

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10 Media, Culture & Society 

dependence on Bollywood tracks, we get the curious outcome whereby each ‘local’ out-
let approximates to other ‘locals’ both within and across networks. The lean and mean
organizational management style that characterizes Radio Mirchi not only cuts costs, but
also prunes the local according to a universal template.
FM radio operates with a notion of the audience markedly different from that of the
previous era when broadcasters had little interest in knowing the specifics of its listeners.
Thus, in the first 50 years of its existence, All India Radio conducted a total of only 800
audience surveys (Baruah, 1983: 182). With the onset of privatization, data relating to
the audience becomes valuable information. Thus the birth, in 1990, of TAM India
(Television Audience Measurement India) – a joint venture company between AC
Nielsen and an Indian media firm – that currently conducts one of the world’ s largest
ratings operations polling over 30,000 individuals in 164 cities and towns every week.
An equivalent service for radio (RAM) followed in 2007 and is currently available in the
cities of Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata (TAM Media Research, 2013). RAM
has become the driver that determines how radio executives think about programming.
According to Amritendu Roy, the business chief of Friends FM, ‘RAM data has over a
period of time become a benchmark for measuring radio listenership in Kolkata. We
identify the weaker day parts and focus on strengthening those parts and make changes
in programming to suit the listenership’ (Radioandmusic, 2009).
Data generated by RAM and other sources reveals FM’s strong reliance on the youth
audience. As of December 2010, 41% of all FM listenership fell in the range of
15–29-year-olds (Radioandmusic, 2011). This is not surprising since FM stations con-
sciously create the kind of programming that will appeal to a younger audience. Such a
strategy is justified by demographics – according to most estimates, two-thirds of the
country is under the age of 35, in other words India currently has a youth population of
approximately 700 million (Mukherjee, 2010). More importantly, the FM-listening urban
youth acts as a vanguard that

has an influence on consumer spending far in excess of its numerical strength. Nine million
people in the age group of 12–25 years from the top 35 cities (one million plus population) in
India are the ones setting the trends and raising the aspirations for one-billion-plus Indians.
(Mehta, 2012)

FM’s deep dependence on and identification with youth culture is strongly evident at
Radio Mirchi. According to Jagannath Basu, the ‘senior’ RJ at the station ‘private FM is
very important for the young generation, generation Y…Through songs, through words,
FM speaks their language.’6 Basu enjoys a unique perspective since he had a long career
at All India Radio and joined Mirchi after retirement. He was trained in the ways of ‘old
radio’ and his observations about working at Mirchi vividly illustrate the paradigm shift
in Indian broadcasting:

Today you have to represent a lot with few words…I am speaking less now, I used to speak
more at AIR. There was no restriction at AIR on how long you could speak but here [Mirchi] if
I speak for more than two and a half minutes she [the Program Controller] will stop me…this
age demands that we speak as concisely as possible with the maximum amount of information…
that’s the difference between this age and the past.

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Sen 11

In other words, the slow and measured speech of the AM era has given way to the speedy
regime of sound bytes. Moreover, the need to tap the youth market creates a personnel
policy strongly biased in favor of the young. In his interview with me, Ribhu Mullick
bluntly observed that, ‘RJs should be like 22 to 29 years in age. They should be energetic,
they should have a good voice…everybody needs to cater to the young group.’ And a
recent ad on the station’s website specified that the applicants for a vacant position ‘must
be between 18 and 30 years’ (radiomirchi, 2013).
Radio Mirchi is not unique in fashioning itself for the youth market, the logic of the
market governs the strategy of most other FM stations in the city in much the same way.
Thus, Power FM targets those who are ‘On the way to school, the way back from college,
the way to their first job … Power 107.8FM is the ultimate frequency on the FM radio
dial for young, cosmopolitan Kolkatans’ (amsi, 2012). And the website for Fever FM –
announces that, ‘with brand values such as Bonding, Urbane, Witty and Innovative,
Fever reinforces the fresh youth culture across the nation through its work and commu-
nication’ (Fever104FM, 2012). FM radio’s notion of its audience is a key to understand-
ing its vast difference with state broadcasting. As pointed out earlier, All India Radio
thought of its audience as a mass public that needed to be educated in the ways of citi-
zenry. For Mirchi and FM, on the other hand, the audience is a set of individualized
consumers that needs to be targeted such that a newly installed regime of consumption
can be sustained. We see then a chain of equivalences and implications between three
terms discussed above: music, youth, and consumption. Youth are formally equivalent to
consumption since the young have a greater propensity to spend; music is equivalent to
youth since the young typically construct their identity through music; consumption is
equivalent to music because both are spoken in the language of desire. In other words,
content, audience, and revenue-generation are strongly bonded together to form the
nucleus, as it were, of FM’s existential shell.
The new incarnation of radio in India is perfectly summed up by this observation from
Indrani Chakrabarti, Programming Controller at Radio Mirchi:

All India Radio does not admit that it is gone and dead. It’s a sad thing. But it is extremely
simple, as you can see the Mirchi office is extremely colorful, it has all these colors… basically
the first thing that happened with Mirchi was we had smart youthful contemporary RJs, and a
really, really contemporary way of packaging audio, making audio interesting, and non-stop
entertainment music…

Radio’s Mirchi’s programming, on-the-air style and day-to-day practices all vividly
illustrate the new vision of radio and are in perfect agreement with its business strategy
and self-representation. Its offices are located in downtown Kolkata, on the 13th floor of
a high-rise commercial building. As the visitors gets off the elevator, they are greeted by
orange and red walls, posters, and logos of the brand name, see-through glass doors sepa-
rating offices and cubicles, and sleek sharply lined furniture that that all add up to a mod-
ish Art Deco ambience. Thus Mirchi quite literally embodies a formula that may be
thought of as describing FM all over India: upbeat, youthful, frenetic, happening, and
contemporary. These attributes also characterize the station’s content, broadcasting style
and audience interface in an effort to live up with it’s own logo ‘Radio Mirchi – Its hot!’

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12 Media, Culture & Society 

Shows (usually broadcast in 2–3-hour slots) have names that signify youth, speed, and
contemporariness: Kolkata Express (‘with the latest Hindi and Bengali chartbusters’);
Club Mirchi (‘It’s party time folks…Life is a party!’); Mirchi Top 20 (‘Top 20 sizzling
filmy tracks of the week’) and Dr. Love (‘Dr. Love will open her chamber to solve your
love problems’); and the station’s RJs (radio jockeys) are promoted as ‘personalities’ in
stark contrast to the faceless and impassive voices that compered shows on All India
Radio. RJ’s portray themselves as appropriate bearers of this ‘fun’ culture. Thus, RJ
Sayani describes herself as ‘easy going, no future planning, living the moment to the
fullest!’ and blithely confesses, ‘Books and I do not get along well.’ And RJ Richard
describes his personality as ‘Insanity Personified!!!!’ and his RJ-ing style as ‘Kick-
Donkey i mean Kick-ass and Wickeeeeeed!!!!’ (radiomirchi, 2013).
Finally, Radio Mirchi’s modes of interfacing and interacting with its audience are
geared to make the station appear as contemporary as possible. As is typical in the age of
convergent media, Radio Mirchi’s website indicates how a radio station today is a multi-
platform entertainment center. The station’s website offers downloads (screensavers,
wallpapers, tunes); Fun@Mirchi lists contests organized by the company as well as two
video games – Mirchi Muncher and Mirchi Hot Racer; all the RJs have their own blogs,
and My Mirchi allows listeners to post comments and request songs online. And in a
move towards the Internet age, the parent organization has started four online stations –
Mirchi Edge (contemporary music); Club Mirchi (dance music); Meethi Mirchi (lit.
Sweet Mirchi, contemporary Bollywood,) and Purani Jeans (lit. Old Jeans, oldies) – that
are designed to appeal to the next generation of radio listeners. In other words, FM is
highly ‘new-mediated’ – much more so than print or television. As the station’s website
puts it radio ‘cannot but be affected by the digital revolution, because the consumer is
effectively saying: If you are not online you are not on my mind’ (Entertainment Network
(India) Limited, 2012).
My findings about Radio Mirchi are brought into sharp focus in an interview I con-
ducted with RJ Deep, the station’s longest-serving deejay. Deep (Deepanjan Ghosh)
joined the station a few months before it launched in 2003 and is the host of several of its
most popular shows – Club Mirchi, Mirchi Top Ten, and Kolkata Express. Deep’s obser-
vation that the first thing ‘the boy who comes to wash your car in the morning does is to
turn on his FM-enabled mobile phone’ vividly illustrates some of FM’s most important
features. First, it shows FM’s increasing popularity – its audience includes not just the
middle classes but the urban working classes as well. Second, it underscores the fact that
FM’s constituency continues to be those who are young, or those who feel young. As
Deep puts it, Mirchi’s listeners are ‘probably a lot like me who in spite of what their
physical age might be, mentally they are in a space of mid 20s to mid 30s.’ Finally, and
most importantly, the linkage between FM and mobile telephony means that FM as radio
is AM’s antithesis in a physical way – whereas medium wave came to you whichever
place you were in, FM travels with you wherever you go. This difference is a trope for
the change in radio’s conception of its audience. For AM, the listener was part of a col-
lectivity and needed to be addressed as a citizen of the nation; for FM, the listener is the
individual-consumer whose sovereignty rests on the act of choosing between stations,
and radio itself is much more akin to an instrument like the smartphone or tablet that
allows for continuous manipulation, interfacing and connectivity. The transition from

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Sen 13

AM to FM is one that involves the replacement of broadcasting by narrowcasting, a

move made necessary by the social and economic exigencies that I have outlined.

Conclusion
FM radio in India is a striking example of the repurposing of a traditional medium. Radio
had to undergo change because, as I have argued in this article, the large-scale transfor-
mations in the Indian society from the 1980s onwards meant that the system of statist
broadcasting in place since the 1930s was no longer viable. The decision to utilize dor-
mant FM technology and grant broadcasting licenses to private operators has given radio
a new lease of life. Taking cues from the culture of consumption that had emerged in the
years since liberalization, private FM networks created a version of radio that was differ-
ent from its predecessor in all respects: industry structure, revenue model, organizational
practices, programming policies, personnel profiles, and audience management. Just as
the era of AM radio needs be analyzed with reference to the guiding principles that gov-
erned the colonial and postcolonial state, FM radio has to be located within the context
of a market-driven consumerist culture that characterizes ‘emerging India.’ This is not to
suggest an inevitable teleology that makes the current version of FM radio the only pos-
sible one. Thus, the remarkable rise of community radio stations in the last few years tells
us that FM technology can be put to uses other than commercial broadcasting (Wise,
2013). Again, as some have suggested, AM radio could again become a relevant force,
perhaps by serving the public interest as a sort of media commons (Thomas, 2013).
That said, privatized FM broadcasting is undoubtedly the most visible face of contem-
porary Indian radio. I want to conclude by drawing attention to the complete absence of
news coverage on contemporary FM. When the Indian government agreed to privatize
the radio industry it did so with the proviso that FM stations would not be allowed to
broadcast the news. This interdiction was quite extraordinary because news had always
been a prominent staple of radio broadcasting. In 1982 for example, 65 news bulletins in
19 languages were broadcast on AIR every single day (Baruah, 1983: 68). Why then was
news banned from FM radio? According to one government official such a prohibition
was justified because ‘the news broadcast on it [radio] is considered the last word and
has unmatched credibility. Therefore it is our duty to see that the news being broadcast
on radio is correct and does not provoke any section of the society’ (Indiantelevision.
com, 2006). This viewpoint made little sense given that private channels on television
were already carrying news when the restrictive FM policy was crafted. This seemingly
bizarre policy, I want to suggest, is less an expression of bureaucratic idiocy (or idiosyn-
crasy), than a symptom of FM’s unique role in the contemporary media universe. FM in
India is ‘newsless’ not as a consequence of censorship, but because the news is simply
not a high priority any more. As RJ Deep pointed out, ‘If you walked up to Arpita [the
receptionist at Radio Mirchi Kolkata] at the front desk and said Narendra Modi [now
Prime Minister of India] has won the elections she would say Oh, Huh.’ Quite surpris-
ingly both Parth Jha7 and Indrani Chakrabarty – Programming Head and Programming
Controller at Mirchi – were very sympathetic to the government’s policies on this issue.
According to Chakrabarty, ‘FM is so local that they [the government] will not be able to
ensure that whatever regulations they have imposed on us are being followed.’ And Jha

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14 Media, Culture & Society 

concurs, observing that ‘News needs a lot more structuring, a little bit of censorship also,
in a very sensitive and political country like ours, you don’t know, one small comment
and it can spark off anything.’ This indifference towards the news is a striking illustration
of radio’s current incarnation. The epochal changes that occurred at the turn of the mil-
lennium put a halt to radio’s mission of nation-building and citizen formation. The
belated adoption of frequency modulation has gone hand in hand with placing the medi-
um’s fortunes within the framework of the emerging Indian marketplace. FM in India
means much more than an advance in the technology of broadcasting; it represents the
birth of a whole new kind of radio.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. Data gathered through interviews and informal survey may be accessed by writing to the
author.
2. Such a dualism was not typical of most postcolonial contexts; however, it begins to make
sense in view of the ‘mixed’ economic model – a combination of nationalized heavy indus-
tries and privatized consumer industries – that the Indian state adopted for itself in the post-
war period.
3. Interviewed on December 17, 2012, Kolkata.
4. Interviewed on December 17, 2012, Kolkata.
5. Interviewed on December 20, 2012, Kolkata.
6. Interviewed on December 20, 2012, Kolkata.
7. Interviewed on December 17, 2012, Kolkata

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