The sole exception was a young man studying for his master' s degree. Among those unaware of the Dalai Lama's existence was their interpreter, a young English-speaking girl who had completed two years of college. It is more than just a matter of poverty. There are no repair facilities in the rural areas, and so an entire system has to be set up to keep the community radios in working order. Besides, many villages do not have electricity and need battery-operated sets, which means that the batteries must be brought into a district center at regular intervals to be recharged.
Language is a further barrier to understanding.
There are fourteen major languages in India, plus a few hundred dialects, and when Nehru speaks in his native Hindustani he is understood by less than half of the people. Unfortunately, the intellectuals who run All India Radio, the government-owned radio network, scorn Hindustani as a polyglot tongue and insist on using a highly Sanskritized version of Hindustani called Hindi, which the government is trying to propagate as the national language. The language pattern outside of north-central India is even more complicated. AIR news broadcasts in Bombay and Hyderabad are delivered in five languages, while special programs for the hill tracts of northeastern India are spoken in fifteen separate dialects. It is laid down in the Indian Constitution that the government should try to switch over from English to Hindi by 1965.