Bringing News to India's Poorest People

[Kerim Friedman]

An interesting project:

Bringing News to India's Poorest People

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/06/bringing-news-to-indias-poorest-people/58898/

JUN 29 2010, 10:24 AM ET | Comment

The tribal areas of India are as far from our media culture as it is
possible to be in today's world. But a project called CGNet Swara,
serving communities in the state of Chhattisgarh and led by a forty-
year-old journalist named Shubhranshu Choudhary, is a fascinating
glimpse of how mobile technology can provide news and information to
people unlike anything they have ever had before.

Choudhary, an experienced television producer with a background in
newspapers, is completing a year as a Knight International Journalism
Fellow. It's a program of the International Center for Journalists
based in Washington; I met him through the program. The essence of his
project is this: The Internet, cable television and newspapers reach
only a fraction of the 80 million people in the rural tribal region of
central India, but about half the population now has access to mobile
phones, which cost the equivalent of only $15 or $20. These people,
citizen journalists, supported by a small group of professional
editors, can collect and deliver news through what amounts to a portal
reachable by a phone number. It is, in effect, a voice version of news
websites with a menu of stories available for listening.

India's tribal people represent an indigenous collection of hundreds
of languages and ethnic backgrounds. Throughout the country, they are
about seven percent of the population. For all the economic and social
progress made by Indians in recent years, the tribes remain at the
bottom of the development curve. The vast forest region where they are
concentrated is a setting for intense conflict, largely the result of
Maoist movements that now represent a significant political force in
the area and a major security threat. Choudhary believes that a
principal cause of the unrest is that the tribal people remain largely
outside the mainstream of India's rapidly developing media. With a
substantial rate of illiteracy and virtually nothing available in
their own languages, they have no means of communication aside from
the age-old world-of-mouth traditions.

The majority of their households still lack electricity. The Internet
reaches less than one percent of the indigenous people, Choudhary
says. Terrestrial television and radio continue to be overwhelmingly
dominated by state-controlled services. (India does have forty news
channels, but they are all on cable or satellite television, which
reaches mainly urban residents who have arrived at international
standards of technology and middle-class identity). So among those
people who can only speak a regional dialect and who are unable to
participate in the country's broader political debates, the local
Maoist influence is particularly strong.

Choudhary grew up in Chhattisgarh, where his father, a Hindu, worked
for the railway as a guard. After school, college, a stint at a
newspaper, and a successful run with the BBC around India, Choudhary
became intrigued with the possibility of developing a news-gathering
operation for his home state. While continuing to freelance for the
BBC and Britain's Channel 4, Choudhary embarked via the Internet to
find a system that might work in the remote hinterlands. He found a
group at MIT working on the development of voice XML technology, which
he describes as a "wiki for non-English speakers with access to a
mobile phone." In a Yahoo discussion group and in conversations on
Skype, the principles for the project were shaped and refined.
Choudhhary's goal was a point of entry as straightforward as a phone
number that would offer the caller a menu of spoken stories ("hit 1")
as well as the capacity to submit stories ("hit 2") that would be
reviewed by an editor and made ready for delivery to other callers.
There is also a companion website at CGNet Swara, where I found an
extensive catalog of stories that can be played.

It has now been about fifty years since the advent of transistor and
battery-powered radios made an enormous impact on these rural areas.
But the news on the radio stations is still very tightly managed by
the state (there are no independent or private news stations). And, of
course, the information only goes one way. That is what makes the
mobile project so promising. For the first time, news can be made
available from across the region in several languages, provided by
reporters in towns and villages in a way that substantial parts of the
community can engage.

The International Center for Journalists (of which I am a board
member) lists 17 international fellows in the competitive Knight
program. Each fellow has embarked on a project with an objective--the
preparation and dissemination of news--comparable to Choudhary's. The
fellows are paid a stipend (Choudhary says he has received $3,000 a
month, plus expenses). For CGNet Swara to continue, Choudhary will
need to find philanthropic funding, and eventually a sustainable
business model. What is most exciting about his effort is the
innovative use of mobile technology. "The real power of the mobile
phone," wrote Sam duPont in a comment for NDN, a Washington think
tank, "is in the fact that people around the world are adopting them
of their own accord. . . . Mobile phones have leapfrogged not just
land-line phones, but television, radio and nearly every other
information and communications service and brings information into
citizens' hands directly."

For those of us immersed in this most sophisticated of media
environments, it comes as an encouraging surprise to learn that the
ubiquitous cell phone could bring news with incalculable benefit to
people who, as Choudhhary observes, have barely left the fifteenth
century in so many other ways.