MUMBAI: Although it’s the eight edition of World Radio Day in 2019, the existence of Radio dates over a century ago. Broadcasting, in its significance, reach and impact,has always been a major medium of communication in the world and India. It is a matter of nostalgia for the recent three generations, to think of their childhood and blaring radio sets at home. Here is the timeline of Radio evolution in the world.
– James Clerk Maxwell, a mathematician presented these observations and findings of the presence of Electromagnetic waves and how they could transmit in free space
-In 1864 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz worked on these theories of electromagnetism and called it Radio Spectrum
– It took over two decades for the word Radio to be used colloquially. Till then, it was addressed as Hertzian Waves
– Indian Polymath and Physicist Jagdish Bose presented many papers describing the power of electromagnetic waves
– In 1894, a young Italian lad Guglielmo Marconi worked further on Hertzian Waves or Radio waves and invented a commercial wireless telegraphy system, which we call as Radio
– The pioneers of Radio broadcasting in India was by Madras Presidency Club in 1924. The broadcasting was shut in three due to a shortage of funds
– In the same year of shutting down of broadcasting in India in 1927, a Bombay based entrepreneur started the Indian Broadcasting Company
– The first two stations for the Indian Broadcasting Company were in erstwhile Bombay and Calcutta
– This too shut down by 1930, following which Government of India started a separate service called Indian Broadcasting Service. This was later designed to be All India Radio in 1932
– All India Radio started with six broadcasting stations in 1947 and today boasts around 450 stations all over India covering more than half the population
– Vividh Bharati, to be the most popular services by AIR was launched in 1957 and featured shows like Binaca Geetmala
– Technically, FM Broadcasting began in India in 1977 but caught steam only 2001, after the privatisation of FM Channels began
– Till 1993 AIR was India’s only trusted Radio channel. However, post-1993, the government started issuing the licenses for private FM channels too
– Currently, there are 369 radio channels in various languages, dialects across the Indian demography covering 101 cities and towns
– Radio City Banglore is India’s first private radio station started in July 2001
-Times Group branded all its radio stations as Radio Mirchi and the first one was launched in Indore
– Despite the wide reach, the advertiser spend in India for Radio is considered to be less than 2%