| Summary/Abstract |
Headaches, infertility and cancer are some of the health hazards most commonly associated with exposure to the electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated by mobile handsets and base transceiver stations. In contemporary India, home to the world’s second biggest market of mobile phone users, the impact of EMF on health has attracted a considerable degree of attention in recent years, leading to debates between citizen lobby groups, central and municipal authorities, telecommunication companies, medical practitioners and scientists. This essay discusses anti-tower activism in urban India and the government’s response to it, aiming to understand how online newspapers and magazines report on this topic and how concerned citizens use various media platforms to challenge government policies around telecom towers. It argues that interpreting anti-tower protests simply as the result of fear-mongering by the media or uninformed citizens overlooks the ways in which campaigners strategically employ discourses about health hazards, in particular the scientific uncertainty surrounding the impact of EMF on health, to protest against the haphazard proliferation of towers and to voice their discontent with the state’s failure to regulate and control the telecom industry.
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