(This paper attempts to analyze the significance of the right to communicate as a basic human right and the factors that deprive the vast majority of Indians of this right on the 'global village green'. The study reveals that while liberalization and globalization have aggravated the communicational inequality between the developed and the developing countries, the denial of access to the new communication media tends to stifle popular participation in public debate. The incorporation of such a right as a fundamental right of the citizens would make it justiciable and ensure the citizens' participation in the public sphere for democratic deliberation.)

The French Revolution was a watershed in the political history of mankind. It spawned in its wake a number of democracies, not only in the developed countries of the world but also in the Third World countries. Underpinning the wave of democratization was the hope that it would empower people as against an elite ruling class of 'barons'. While this hope was realized to a great extent in the developed West, it was not in the so-called developing East. As Jurgen Habermas points out, a critical factor in the rise and success of democratic movements was the existence of a public sphere for democratic deliberation.1 Unfortunately, this public sphere remained for the most part out of bounds to a majority of people in the developing countries. As a result, a vast gap between the rulers and the ruled continues to dog the functioning of the democracies in these countries.



If such was the reality at the national level, the picture at the international level was no better. Fifty-five years down the line that is since the inception of the United Nations the international public sphere for democratic debate among the countries of the world continues to be dominated by the agenda set by the developed countries of the world, as evidenced in the debates of the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. The reality has become grimmer with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world.



In such a scenario of imbalance between the privileged and the marginalized in the public sphere for democratic deliberation at the national and international levels, the advent of the new information and communication technologies has kindled the hope of bridging this gulf through its virtual global village green that is non-discriminatory in vesting the right to communicate with the people.



Set against this backdrop, this paper is a humble attempt at analyzing the significance of the right to communicate as a basic human right and the factors that deprive the vast majority of Indians of this right on the 'global village green'. To this end, the study has been divided into four sections: the first section takes a panoptic look at the conceptual background of the demand for the right to communicate, the second examines the need for the right to communicate in/for a developing country like India, the third surveys the current efforts in this direction in the country, the fourth explores the possibility of ensuring this right through the use of the new information and communication technologies (NICTs) and the roadblocks in the fulfillment of this possibility and the last concludes the discussion.




Section I: Conceptual Background


The first mention of the right to communicate is attributed to Jean D' Arcy, the then Director of Radio and Visual Services in the UN Office of Public Information, who in 1969, published an article entitled Communication satellites and the right of man to communicate. 2 In that article D' Arcy wrote: ' The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man's right to information, first laid down twenty one years ago in Article 19. This is the right of man to communicate.' 3 Though in this paper D' Arcy did not spell out what he meant by the right to communicate, he gave broad hints to what he meant by it in a paper of 1978. He wrote, ' From the very first, this fundamental right was implicit in, and underlay, all freedoms that have successively been won: freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of information'. 4



The linear view of the concept enunciated over here has underlain much of the efforts aimed at defining the right to communicate. As one commentator has rightly remarked, 'The right to communicate is a demand that has always been at the heart of social struggle. As times change, and as socio-technical contexts shift, this right has been given different names: freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to information, and, now, the right to communicate. The latter is the embodiment of its precursors in the era of globalisation.' 5



Jim Richstad and Michael H. Anderson too echo the evolutionary view when they observe that 'The right to communicate is a complex and evolving concept ...' 6 Commenting on the dangers posed by the complexity of this right, William F. Birdsall observes: 'A challenge to defining a right to communicate is to insure that it is not either a meaningless generality or so encompassing and complex that it collapses from its own weight. To meet this problem one of its most forceful advocates, Desmond Fisher, proposes adopting an hierarchical conceptual framework that distinguishes between rights, freedoms, and entitlements.' 7



L. S. Harms8, a prominent proponent of the right to communicate, too suggests a hierarchical conceptual framework for the right that accepts the fundamental, the inclusive and the comprehensive character of the right at the first, the second and the third levels respectively.



At the inclusive level, there are three classes of specific communication rights: association rights, information rights, and global rights. Like Fisher who speaks of 'entitlements' as being an essential component of the right to communicate, he emphasizes that 'As a common standard for achievement, the full recognition of the right to communicate requires that the necessary resources be available to meet the basic communication needs of everyone.' 9



In a similar vein, Susana Finquelievich maintains that 'The Right to Communicate has also been expanded to include the notion of universal access to information and communication technologies (ICTs), with access seen as both a technical and social infrastructure (Clement, Shade, 1997; 1999); the right to public access; and public participation to both the means of communication and towards policymaking.' 10 In this paper, the term right to communicate has been used in the sense of the term defined by Harms and Fisher.



The demand for the right to communicate has its genesis in the growing imbalance in the communication flow and infrastructure between the developed and the developing countries. The immediate context for the voicing of a call for a new international information and communication order was the rapid spawning of media multinationals, consequent upon the cluttering of the space with communication satellites. 11 On this call of the Movement of the Non- Aligned countries, the UNESCO set up the MacBride Commission to study the problem and suggest possible solutions for removing this imbalance. Of the 82 recommendations in its final report, Many Voices, One World, the Commission emphasized the need for 'eliminating the media imbalances between countries; protecting the rights of journalists; reducing commercialism in the media; use of the media to aid oppressed peoples; and recognition of the freedom of the press and freedom of information.' 12



However, with the failure of UNESCO's initiatives for a New World Information and Communication Order, the issue entered a period of dormancy. As Brom Dov Abramson and Alain Ambrosi have also observed, 'After a flurry of activity around the proposed New World Information and Communication Order in the late 1970s and early 1980s, discussion of the right to communicate has lain dormant for a decade. Now, however, fifty years after the United Nations breathed life into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the term and its debate seem to be making a come-back.'13 The reasons for this reawakening of interest lie in the sweeping wave of globalization that threatens to impose the hegemony of the developed West over the developing countries of the East, including India.



At the political level, globalization holds the potential of subjecting the developing countries to the diktats of a single superpower which has an over bearing presence in the yet-to-be-democratized global body, the UN. The organizational structure of the UN leaves much to be desired for its effective representation of the global community of nations. The increasingly activist role of the UN, at the instance of the developed West, creates a feeling of distrust and suspicion in the Third World, not to mention the strong reaction to the infamous concept of the clash of civilizations. At the economic level, globalization has increasingly been seen in the undeveloped countries as an attempt of the developed world to hunt for markets for its business and industry.



Indian media is rife with the statements of fears of neocolonialism in the garb of globalisation. Many NGOs, particularly Swadeshi Jagran Manch of the present ruling NDA political alliance and farmers' groups like the Bhartiya Kissan Union, have expressed their unequivocal opposition to the liberalization of the economy. The WTO stands stigmatized in the eyes of these civil society agencies as a herald of the future misery of the weak and the marginalized like the farmers and small and medium enterprises.



At yet another level, globalization has come to imply the increased flow of media products from the developed world. With their technical finesse and big budgets, these products tend to lure the audiences away from the media products of their native culture. It has fallout also on the cultural mores and lifestyles of the people, especially the younger generation. The native cultural traditions tend to look passé, while the Western cultural traditions appear refreshingly glamorous. There are innumerable instances where civil society agencies have protested vehemently, and sometimes violently too, against the spread of such new and alien cultural mores.14



But, the juggernaut of globalization keeps steamrolling over all these protests and reactions, as these reactions are scattered and too ill organized to assume the form of a mass movement. Underlining this reality, the Global Movement for People's Voices in Media and Communication in the 21st Century remarks: 'Increasingly, however, concerns are being expressed regarding the major trends in global media. While technological progress, and political and regulatory changes, can potentially benefit many of those in need, the scales seem increasingly tipped in favour of the already powerful. There is genuine and growing concern that global trends in media and communication are leading us into uncharted territory, and that those at the helm have no particular interest in the needs of the majority of the world's people.'15



In such an international scenario, the demand for the right to communicate holds special relevance for developing countries like India.



Section II: Need of the right to communicate as a basic human right in India



Post-independent India was conceived as a democracy wedded to the philosophy of welfare economics. Accordingly, the Constitution of free India gave sovereign power to the people and in pursuance of this ideal vested people with certain fundamental rights, inclusive of the right to freedom of expression, not unlike those enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Obviously, the purpose was to create a public space for democratic deliberation, where people could freely express their opinions.



But the harsh realities of its socio-economic life and the magnitude of its landmass have more often than not stood in the way of the realization of this ideal. Forty three percent of the population in India is illiterate. 16 A majority of the fifty seven percent that is literate has only the ability to read and write. Only a miniscule minority possesses higher education degrees. Besides, around twenty six percent of its population still lives below the poverty line. With about seventy-two percent of the population living in rural areas that have little civic infrastructural facilities, the majority of the population has little ability to influence the political decision making process in the country.



As a result what evolves is an elite class of rulers drawn from the urban rich, the rural gentry and the upwardly mobile upper castes, who together constitute a fragment of the entire population. The nexus between them ensures that regardless of which party comes to power, the establishment retains control over the decision-making bodies of the state. This deprives the entire exercise of holding periodic general elections in the country its true purpose of electing a representative government of the people. The passive common man - inclusive of the urban middle and poor classes, the rural landless, and the small and marginal and sub-medium farmers - remains cooling his heels outside the portals of power.



It is this dispossessed section of the ruled - and this is around a whopping ninety per cent of the population - that becomes easy prey to sloganeering in the name of religion and caste by political parties, which offer the lollipop of redrawing the cartography of the nation, that is India. So, if the nation at one stage gets defined in terms of 'Mandal', at another it takes on the hue of 'kamandal', two highly emotive terms in the nation building process in India.17



Then there are those segments of the country, which culturally have never been a part of India. But, in the wake of Indian independence, they were integrated into the nation, for instance the tribal communities of the North East. Due to their fewer numbers, these communities cannot exercise effectively the deciding power that the Constitution otherwise gives to them. As a result, they remain neglected and marginalized.



Also, the linguistic divide between the North and the South, which is at its fiercest in the extreme south, Tamil Nadu, threatens the nation as defined by the Hindi heartland. With a population of about a billion and a vast landmass that has been rightly referred to as the Indian sub-continent, India thrives in contradictions of power-inequality and is a nation at loggerheads with itself.



In such a highly skewed socio-economic environment, the development communication paradigm followed has not helped in any way. Still stuck up with the long discredited top-down or the so-called dominant paradigm of communication, the extension programmes of the various developmental agencies of the government have come a cropper in most cases and have rarely ever benefited the target groups. As a result, the marginalized majority of the population continues to remain outside the public domain of democratic deliberation.



The independent media too has not done much to mitigate the harshness of this reality. With most of the media in the hands of big business houses and targeted at the upper class urban consumers, the Indian media may be best described as metropolitan media. Stories of grassroots development scarcely draw any attention, what to speak of front-page coverage.



Unfortunately, the vernacular press, which had played a stellar role in the freedom struggle, too has abdicated its responsibility towards the people. It thrives on sensationalism and page 3 culture. Most of the reporters working for this press lack journalistic ethics, a fact attested to in most conferences on the state of the media in the country. Many of these journalists are scarcely ever paid salaries. So, for them employment as a reporter implies passport to blackmail with journalistic immunity.



Though the English press retains some measure of gravity, its focus remains the upper middle class in the cities. Besides, with the government aware of the inability of the media to create a mass movement against its acts of misgovernance, it has developed complete imperviousness to the criticism in the press.



One significant instance of this that directly impinges on the independence of the press in the country has been the recent decision of the government to allow 26 per cent foreign direct investment in the print media. This decision of the government has come in for severe criticism not only within but also outside the parliament. 18 Interestingly, the government chose to over-rule the decision of the Parliamentary Standing Sub-committee on Information and Broadcasting, which by a majority decision had ruled in favor of continuing with the Cabinet decision of 1955 on the subject.19



The government also chose to ignore the pleas of the Editor's Guild of India against allowing FDI in print media. In an environment of imbalance of the communication infrastructure and the flow of information between the developed and the developing countries, the opening up of the print media to foreign direct investment holds the potential of landing the Indian print media in the kitty of the media transnational corporations. The interests of such corporations even in the developed world have been characterized by the bottom line of their respective businesses than by public good. So, it is feared that the arrival of these corporations on the media scene of the country would lead to the projection of extra-territorial interests in the Indian media and the consequent suffocation of native voices.



In such a bleak communication scenario, there is an urgent need to recognize the primacy of the people's right to communicate on the global village green so that people might intervene effectively in the political and developmental affairs of the country for their common good.



Section III: Current Initiatives in India



The current initiatives in India in this regard are restricted to the movement for the right to freedom of information. As a reaction to the top-down communication paradigm followed in all developmental efforts in India, the movement for the right to information seeks to vest initiative in the communication process with the ordinary citizen. Tracing the grassroots origin of the movement in a very evocative style, Ajit Bhattacharjea, the Director of the Press Institute of India, writes in his article, From Beawar to Parliament, that:



It doesn't seem that long ago. Nevathi Bai, coloured ohrni drawn before her face in the best Rajasthani tradition, sat patiently for three hours on the packed triangular patch of ground before Beawar's Chaang gate, before getting up to speak. But what she said echoed and set the tone for a demand that ignited a mass campaign impelling eight State governments to pass right to information legislation and now for Parliament to enact the Freedom of Information Bill, 2002.... Beawar was my first exciting glimpse of the revolutionary potential of the grassroot campaign for access to information, of setting direct democracy in motion to achieve the basic rights of citizens.20



That was in 1996, but the movement owed its genesis to Aruna Roy's Mazdoor Kissan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) that had been working for its success since 1994. Despite bureaucratic and political lack of will to empower the so-called sovereign people to access government files to assess if the people's money had been well spent, the movement continued to gather momentum until the eight State governments of Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan had not passed legislation to this effect, though not without the ubiquitous provisos meant to deny inconvenient information on one pretext or the other.21



In Parliament, the Freedom of Information bill was introduced in 2000, but it was only in December 2003 that the bill could become a law and that too at the prodding of the Supreme Court of India. Critiquing the bill, Prashant Bhushan writes:

There are four criteria on which the strength of a right to information Act can be judged. 1) The width of application of the Act, i.e. the nature of organizations or institutions to which it applies or does not apply. 2) The range and kind of information that it can be used to access and the kinds of information that are exempted from disclosure. 3) The independence of the institutions, which would adjudicate disputes between the citizens and the State regarding the disclosure of particular pieces of information. 4) The sanctions in the law against willful and mala fide refusal to disclose information or incorrect disclosure of information. On each of the above four indicia, the Bill is quite weak.22



Apart from the flaws inherent in the bill, the right to information movement itself does not address the issue of the citizen's right to communicate. It may at the best help in checking the misutilization of the funds. But, in so far as empowering the people to communicate in the public sphere is concerned, it is much too inadequate.



In view of the inability of the common man to participate in the national communication scenario, it is essential that his right to access communication resources be recognized. However, as the traditional media suffers from an inherent bias towards the dominant paradigm of communication, empowerment of the common citizen is a far-fetched goal. It is in such a scenario of communicational disability that the new information and communication technologies raise a hope.



Section IV: Online communication and right to communicate in India



The interactive character of online communication gives it a unique edge over all the other forms of communication channels that have evolved so far in human history. Besides, its feature of multimediality makes it a complete media, something that the older media could never achieve. As a result, the World Wide Web has become the modern avatar of the agrarian village green, where the village elders would sit and deliberate upon the political and economic matters of the village apart from gossip. In its modern incarnation, the global village green spurns the barriers of geographical distance and cultural dissimilarities, thus playing the social integration role in a never before seen way.



Besides, its interactivity raises hopes of enabling people to communicate with each other without the mediation of the journalist middleman, who has for the most part been serving the interests of the ruling class and misusing the gatekeeping function of the media to the disadvantage of the common people. Thus, on the global village green, the passivised audiences stand activated enough to set their own agenda, in consonance with the public will.



It is this public space that can truly make a democracy functional and geared to the common good of the people. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur's 1998 Report to the Commission attests to the evocation of this hope when it observes that 'the new technologies and, in particular, the Internet are inherently democratic, provide the public and individuals with access to information sources and enable all to participate actively in the communication process. The Special Rapporteur also believes that action by States to impose excessive regulations on the use of these technologies and, again, particularly the Internet, on the grounds that control, regulation and denial of access are necessary to preserve the moral fabric and cultural identity of societies is paternalistic."23



Besides, the worldwide reach of the global village green opens up the possibilities of integrating the intellectual and cultural sectors of the nation with that of the entire world without any biases in any one's favor. Not surprisingly, a number of small and medium newspapers in the country have hosted their web sites and increased their geographical reach. These newspapers could never have expanded their reach with the old media technologies.



Also, the financial disabilities they suffered from in the use of the older media no longer incapacitate them on the World Wide Web. As a result, they can enjoy a level playing field vis-à-vis the news-sites of the West. What applies to news-sites applies equally well to other forms of online sites on the web such as the meta and index sites and alternative media sites. While, the former can provide a beehive of information on native cultures, the latter can lend voice to the voiceless. In other words, the imbalance of communication infrastructure between the developed West and the developing East could, to a great extent, be corrected with the help of online communication.



Ensuring the people's right of access to this communication media is, therefore, essential if democracies in the Third World are to serve the interests of their people and ensure their right to development. But, ensuring people's access to the global village green is quite often confounded by a number of factors.



Section V: Roadblocks to the citizen's right to communicate



The realization of the right to communicate on the global village green is affected by a number of adverse factors.



Abysmally low teledensity


Firstly, the country has one of the lowest teledensities in the world. As per the World Telecommunication Development Report, 1999, ITU, the teledensity in the country is estimated to be 2.28 main lines per 100 persons. The National Telecom Policy, 1999 purports to raise teledensity to 7 per cent by 2005 and 15 per cent by 2010, which is still much below the level available in the developed countries of the world.



However, the silver lining in the clouds is the liberalization of the telecom sector as a result of which the telecom network is poised for a big leap in terms of its coverage. The entry of the mobile phone service providers has added to the subscriber base of the telecom users. At present, the number of basic phone subscribers in the country is 40 million and the mobile phone subscribers 10 million. 24 This number is still way below the desired level.



In addition, the cheapening of the mobile services along with the provision of net-based services promises to usher in a revolution of sorts in the country. However, despite all these heartening signals the Universal Service obligation of connecting all the 660,000 villages in the country, where the majority of Indians live, still remains a pipedream. In the absence of a well-connected telecom infrastructure, the citizen's access to the global village green remains curtailed.



High cost of computers





A standard branded computer is still way beyond the means of an average citizen. The prices of non-branded assembled computers are comparatively cheaper. Still, computers tend to be prohibitively priced for even the middle class, what to speak of the lower classes. As the focus of the government is more on software exports, this sub-sector remains neglected.



The innovation of simputer, a portable computer costing not more than USD 200, offers the hope of depressing the prices and bringing computers within the reach of the major section of the ruled residing in villages and working in cities. But, the simputer project needs strong government support to take off. With government support, it could become the people's computer and enable millions of people in India to communicate on the World Wide Web. Another development, which too could empower people to communicate on the Web, is the falling prices of mobile handsets. With the incorporation of web-based services on the cell-phones in India, the mobile handset could help ensure the citizen's right to communicate without much liability on the State's resources.



Computer literacy


In view of the low level of computer penetration in the country, the computer literacy is very low. This restricts the use of online communication by the common man. While adult literates, including those working in universities, are computer-shy, a large section of those living in villages have scarcely ever operated a computer. The innovation of simputer, however, offers the hope of solving this problem. With its user-friendly software available in the local languages, it has the potential of overcoming this technology shyness of the people. The introduction of simputers can, therefore, help draw these people on the net, thereby empowering them to communicate on the global village green.



Internet regulations



Apart from the social and technical factors mentioned above, the Internet regulations in the country too are highly restrictive. Various provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which is the sheet anchor of Internet regulation in the country, militate against the guarantees of human rights available in the internationally accepted covenants of human rights. An appraisal of the IT Act, 2000, as made by Dhar and Thapar, 25 shows that:

1.Section 29 violates the guarantee of right to privacy enshrined in article 17 and article 12 of ICCPR and UDHR respectively. It also militates against the spirit of article 5 of ICCPR and articles 29 and 30 of UDHR, which prohibit the state to limit the human rights of its citizens. Besides, by imposing such restrictions on the use of the new media, the Act disregards the injunction contained in article XI of the Declaration on the Contribution of the Mass Media.

2. Section 43 intends to fulfill the mandate of right to privacy as enshrined in article 17 of ICCPR and article 12 of UDHR.

3. Section 66 upholds the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in article 19 of ICCPR and article 19 of UDHR. It also endorses the duty of the state to protect human rights as mentioned in Para 5 of the Teheran Proclamation and article 2 (clauses 1 and 2) of the Declaration on the Right and Responsibility. Besides, it upholds article XI of the Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of Mass Media.

4. Section 67 violates netizens' right to freedom of expression as enunciated in article 19 of ICCPR and article 19 of UDHR as also the duty of the state to protect human rights as enshrined in Para 5 of Teheran Proclamation and article 2 of the Declaration on the Right and Responsibility. This section also fails to defend the right of a child to protection against sexual abuse as provided for in article 34 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Principle 9 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

5. Section 69 infringes the right to privacy guaranteed by article 17 of ICCPR and article 12 of UDHR. By giving unbridled powers of surveillance to the Controller, the Act violates the guarantees contained in articles 5 of ICCPR and articles 29 (clause 2) and 30 of the UDHR. Besides, by imposing undue restrictions on the use of the Net, the Act violates the injunction contained in article XI of the Declaration on the contribution of the Mass Media. Sub-section 2 of section 69 conflicts with the right of the individual not to be compelled to testify against oneself as mentioned in article 14 clause 3 (g) of ICCPR.

6. Section 72 prescribes disproportionate punishment for the offence of breach of privacy. While section 69 (3) makes a citizen guilty of this offence liable for an imprisonment of up to seven years, section 72 makes officials guilty of the same crime liable to imprisonment up to 2 years only.

7. Section 76 makes it clear that the confiscation shall have to be adjudicated by a court and not by an executive fiat. That should prevent any misuse of the power granted by this section.

8. By giving the state limitless powers to arrest without warrant any person suspected of having committed, committing, or about to commit any offence under the provisions of this Act, section 80 flagrantly violates the civil right to citizens against arbitrary arrest as guaranteed in article 9 and 3 of ICCPR and UDHR respectively and of being presumed innocent until proved guilty as per articles 14 and 11 of ICCPR and UDHR respectively.

9. By giving almost blanket immunity to erring state officials against any kind of suit, section 84 disregards the relief granted by articles 2, 9 and 26 of ICCPR and 2 and 7 of UDHR and 9 of Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

Section VI: Conclusion

The preceding discussion shows that the sweeping wave of liberalization and globalization has made the demand for the right to communicate much more relevant today than it was when the demand was first voiced by the Movement of the Non-Aligned Nations in international forums. The public response to the threat perception of foreign business and media multinationals invading the country and despoiling the native culture needs to be addressed through the guarantee of a right to communicate.

Besides, within the bounds of the nation itself, a large section of the populace continues to remain deprived of access to communication media. As a result, their voices tend to get stifled and development plans and programmes ignore the grassroots realty. While the new information and communication technologies have the potential of empowering the ordinary citizen in terms of his/her access to the media, there are a number of roadblocks to the realization of the hope evoked by them.

Were the state to recognize the citizen's right to communicate, then it would become incumbent on it to enable the citizens to have access to communication media. The incorporation of such a right as a fundamental right of the citizens would make it justiciable and ensure the citizens' participation in the public sphere for democratic deliberation. Thus, the guarantee of right to communicate on the global village green can not only empower the national cultural and media industry in the international communication scenario but also empower the people vis-à-vis the ruling elite in the country.

Notes:

1. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence, translators (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989). Originally published in German in 1962, commented upon in Mark Lloyd, Communications Policy is a Civil Rights Issue Available at: http://www.oneworld.net/anydoc2.cgi?u=http://www.civilrightsforum.org/text/compolsum.htm|root=528

2. William F. Birdsall calls D' Arcy the father of the idea of the right to communicate in "A Canadian Right to Communicate?" Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada No. 15 (September 1998). Available at : http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/15/birdsall.html
3. ibid.

4. L.S.Harms. "The right to communicate: towards explicit recognition", Available at: http://www.iicom.org/intermedia/Dec2001/Harms.htm .
5. Unesco compendium of treaties and laws on communication. Available at: http://www.unesco.org/webworld/com/compendium/sub_content.html

6. William F. Birdsall, op. cit.,

7. ibid.,

8. L.S. Harms, op. cit.,

9. ibid.,

10. ([Steering] The Right to Communicate in the digital age: Bridging the Digital Divide in a Democratic Digital Society) Available at: www.globalcn.tc.ca/pipermail/steering/2001-May/000168.html

11. William F. Birdsall says, 'It was also the emergence of satellite technology that gave birth to the idea of the right to communicate. ' op. cit.

12. Leslie Regan Shade, 'Whose Right to Communicate?', Paper presented to 'Citizens at the Crossroads: Whose Information Society' London, Canada, Oct. 21-24, 1994. Available at http://www.fims.uwca/citizens/

13.'Imaging the Right to Communicate', Available at: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9807/msg00018.html

14. The celebrations of St. Valentine's day, a phenomenon that owes its popular acceptance by the youth in India owing to the foreign satellite TV channels, were marred by Shiv Sainiks in the commercial city of Mumbai last year. The Miss World beauty pageant-cum-competition in Bangalore was itself held under the threat of the local social organizations opposed to the competition, particularly the swimsuit contest, which therefore had to be shifted to Seychelles.

15. http://www.communica.org/v21/index.htm

16. The figures mentioned over here have been taken from the World Development Indicators Database, July 2001. Available at: http://www.worldbank.org/data/dataquery.html

17. During the premiership of Vishwanath Pratap Singh, his sacked deputy, the late Mr. Devi Lal made a show of farmers' power at the Boat Club grounds in New Delhi. To counter that with the support of the backward communities, Singh immediately fished out the dust-gathering Mandal Commission Report that had recommended reservation in government jobs for the members of the backward castes and classes. It led to many a young unemployed men commiting suicides in protest against this action of his government.

18. The statutory watchdog of the Press, Press Council of India, the All India Newspaper Employees Federation, the Indian Journalists Association, the National Union of Journalists, the Employees' Union of the Press Trust of India, the United News of India, major newspaper bodies of The Times of India, The Tribune and The Hindustan Times opposed the government's move to allow FDI in print media. The move was also opposed by the Congress, the Telugu Desam Party, Samata party, Samajwadi party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Communist Party of India-Marxist and other political parties in the parliament.

19. The earliest decision on the FDI dates back to 1955 when the then Union Cabinet under Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru resolved to accept the recommendation of the Press Commission appointed in 1953 that foreign investment in the print media and the publication of foreign newspapers and journals in India be prohibited.

20. Ajit Bhattacharjea, 'From Beawar to Parliament', Grassroots, January 2003, p.12

21. ibid., p.13

22.Prashant Bhushan, 'A Weak Freedom of Information Act', Grassroots, January 2003, p.14

23.URL:http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu4/chrrep/98chr40.htm , taken from Leslie Regan Shade, Whose Right to Communicate? Citizens at the Crossroads: Whose Information Society, Available at: http://www.fims.uwo.ca/citizens/

24.The Tribune, Chandigarh, January 25, 2003

25.Ravi K. Dhar and Sheetal Thapar, 'Interrogating IT Act, 2000- A Human Rights Perspective', Paper presented in the National Seminar on Human Rights, Indian Culture and Human Society: Challenges in the Twenty-first Century, 24-26 November, 2001, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India