The ICA India Chapter was flagged off in New Delhi on April 2, 2024. The India chapter is the sixth and aims to enlarge the scope of ICA at national and regional levels. India with its subcontinental spread, diversity, and plurality with significant institutional spread in the communication and media sector, can enrich the widen the scope of activities. The potential as well as a few initiatives in India, such as the conference in Mumbai in 2017 and Regional Hubs in Hyderabad and Manipal will be institutionalized formally through the formation of the ICA Chapter. This was worked upon with the encouragement of the then President of the ICA, Prof Noshir Contractor. The formal launch was a culmination of individual and institutional efforts.
At the inauguration, Ranjan Bose, the Director of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), New Delhi, described how honored they were to host and provide institutional support for the kick-off event of the ICA Chapter. The immediate past president of ICA, Noshir Contractor, gave a perceptive rationale for forming ICA chapters and the promise that the India chapter holds in strengthening the discipline in academic and professional aspects. The inaugural address was delivered by Kiran Karnik, Chairperson of the Board of Governors of IIIT and a key member of the think tank that planned the world's largest communication program, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), in 1975-76. He highlighted the challenges of the time in launching television in 2400 backward villages of India through the availability of the most advanced communication satellites provided by NASA. Direct Reception Sets had entered India ahead of all other countries. The task was compounded by the lack of power supply and required innovative use of automobile batteries to run the television sets. The kind and nature of information in development sectors and how to produce them in multiple languages across the SITE terrain added another dimension. The interplay of social scientists, engineers, and technicians was evident. Kiran's narration of the process recognized the complexity of communication in different social contexts.
The panel discussion that followed the inaugural address recognized the challenges of carrying forward the ICA India Chapter activities and outlined a few, such as organizing workshops, promoting textbooks, working with and incorporating indigenous knowledge systems, and developing and building upon the research traditions and practices to address India's contemporary needs.
Prof. Eun-Ju Lee, President of ICA, congratulated the ICA India team for realizing this goal. In addition, representatives from other Regional Chapters, and ICA scholars from the Indian subcontinent joined us online to congratulate the ICA India Team. These included Prof. Carsten Wilhelm (France Chapter), MengXiao Zhu (China Chapter), Ekate George (Nigeria Chapter), Nia Sarinastiti (Indonesia Chapter), Deb Aikat from the U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Rajiv Rimal from Johns Hopkins U.
The ICA India Chapter itself has the formative institutional participation of the Manipal Institute of Communication, the U of Hyderabad, Jamia Milia Islamia U, IIIT New Delhi, Viswa Bharati U, the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Symbiosis, and U of Burdwan among others. The full potential of the chapter is expected to be realized in the long run when more than 400 educational and training institutions in India and their academic and research community get actively involved to carry forward the objectives and goals of the chapter. Broadly, the goals are in tune with any professional organization and incorporate networking and synergizing the human resources to reflect and enhance the scope of academic and research activities, provide learning opportunities to young and middle-level scholars in the discipline, to periodically organize and meet in academic fora where exchange and sharing of ideas and thoughts take place, to utilize the opportunities embedded in ICA and enhance greater interaction of diverse scholarship from across the world, to learn and share ideas with other ICA Chapters for both comparative and context-specific understanding and to promote and increase wider dissemination of academic output from the region for larger peer understanding and inputs.
The ICA India Chapter has an institutional framework that is worked out per the relevant registration provisions in India. A voluntary leadership team has been identified, as mandated for the registration of the Chapter in India: President/Chairperson - Dr BP Sanjay, Professor, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal, India; Vice Chairperson- Vinod Pavrala, Professor, U of Hyderabad, India; Vice Chairperson-Dr Usha Raman, Professor, U of Hyderabad, India; Member Secretary, Dr. Padma Rani, Director, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal, India; Treasurer- Dr Venkata Ratnadeep Suri, Assistant Professor, IIIT Delhi, India; Co-Treasurer-Dr. Bishwajit Das, Professor, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, India; Membership Committee coordinator: Dr Mausumi Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor, Viswa-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal; Event Planning Committee coordinator: Dr Rajesh Das, Assistant Professor, U of Burdwan, Burdwan, West Bengal; Digital and Social Media Committee coordinator: Dr Kulveen Trehan, Assistant Professor, GGSIP, New Delhi. A global advisory board has also been constituted, leveraging leading scholars many with long-standing affiliations with ICA.
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