Hi there, I’d like to introduce myself, as I’m a new member of this newly formed social media network – Channel 19. What attracted me first and foremost about this online platform is that everything that is showcased and issues we focus on are about communities in rural and urban India who make their own media.
As a filmmaker and visual arts experimenter, I’m excited about working as the online manager for Channel 19 because I will be transforming the media that communities have made into media that global communities, who have access to the internet, can watch, share and take action upon. This literally means taking 30 minutes of un-subtitled DV footage with lots of man on the street interviews, reporter style soundbites and documentary footage amongst other shots, and cutting this down into 5-10 minutes worth of material which will tell the story and yet still be true to the content, as this is genuinely media produced from the bottom up.

Firstly, let me share with you what Channel 19 was created. The name, which we need to change soon, is based after Article 19 of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a project of Video Volunteers and the India-based partner NGO, Drishti Media Arts, as these NGOs have set up “community video units” with several India based NGOs and continue to create more CVUs in India and in Brazil. The concept of a CVU is modeled around a production house that creates media for a broadcaster, which in this case, is the NGO. The online space we’ve created on Channel 19 can be viewed as a network that gathers all these shows on various issues and distributes them out to the global audiences, such as yourself.

This is somewhat the stumbling block I now face as the editor for the online content – how to make this media engaging and relevant when there is so much media out there online and from that pile, there is so much to weed through. I have about 30 films from the various six CVUs we have set up across India, and these magazine-style videos have been shown across various villages and slums across the country. When I remind myself of the impact some of these films have made – whether its getting 700 families to demand land rights, or whether its getting people to push the local government to provide them their basic amenities, it hits that if the number of views could multiply by hundreds, imagine what could happen. And this is why I believe that there is a place for this media online – and if anything, you should also have the right to weed through online media and find a story that is genuine and directly delivered from the people in poor communities here to you – wherever you may be.

So please do suggest blogs, channels, interactive platforms to share our content!
- Ruchika

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members–young men and women from the slums and villages of India–into their new full-time jobs as ‘Community Video Producers,’ we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. ‘This pyramid,’ the Video Trainer says, ‘represents the global media.’ The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers–the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India’s Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India’s regional language private news stations, then India’s national television, ‘Doordarshan,’ etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global population is represented by that particular media outlet. But never does it appear that more than the top 20% of the global population (the middle class and urban part of the world) find their own representatives in the media hierarchy. Then we draw a line near the bottom of the triangle, to illustrate the ‘bottom of the pyramid,’ which is the 1/3rd of the world living on less than $2 a day. This is where the Community Producers are from.

‘We want you to become the CNN for the Base of the Pyramid,’ is what we say.

They start to share stories about how their own local papers only cover road accidents and photo ops of politicians. They come up with their own questions that the local media should answer but fails to (who is responsible for the lack of electricity in their area? Have the politicians fulfilled their election promises from last year?) They get out rulers and measure the column width given to the different ‘beats’–how much space does health coverage get, compared to celebrity coverage. As training progresses, they will start each day by analyzing today’s paper. In this way, the Community Video Producers begin their transformation into media activists.

The Community Producers, at the moment, produce exclusively for a local audience–100-400 people a night who gather in the center of the village to watch the film and discuss what they will do about the issue. But their political perspective–on the politics and economics of the global media–is national. And they just had a small victory.

They are going to be producing for CNN IBN, one of the three leading English language 24 hour news stations in India.

For the next three Saturdays, at 9pm, the Community Producers will have a short segment in a half-hour show called ‘Citizens Journalist.’ The first story will be a general report on our work. The next two stories will be on garbage and sexual harassment. Each CNN IBN segment that we do will revisit an issue the Community Video Unit has already made a film about, and will give another demand to the authorities to do something about the problem.

I learned a few things, both about our model of community video, and about the mainstream media, in working out this deal:

Sustainability: CNN IBN is going to pay us Rs. 5,000 for each story ($125). If we can work very efficiently, this can be a break even project for the Community Video Unit (’CVU.’) That’s a first goal — to be efficient and break even on new projects they undertake. We talk about a ‘media industry at the base of the pyramid’ as our big goal. Obviously it needs to be sustainable. but the question is how? I guess not making a loss is a first step, but we need help getting to the next level. How do the CVUs make a profit, so they can expand their number of Producers, raise salaries, get new equipment, serve more people?
A ‘Social Media Network’ for the base of the pyramid: we designed our model of Community Video with the idea of reaching scale. We aim to partner with 30 NGOs in five years, to train more than 200 Producers, and thereby create a media-producing ‘Network’ that is at least as large (in terms of number of full-time video journalists employed) as a single Indian national news Network. Our ‘Network’ of NGOs and Community Producers is tentatively called ‘Channel 19′. We were thrilled that CNN IBN has agreed to describe the Producers as part of the Channel 19 Network, and also that our NGO partners have agreed to this experiment in collective identity. For us, this is a chance to test out a hypothesis we have: the TV media has hardly any stories about the poor, that show the situation from their point of view. But yet, there is a lot of social documentary material and social issue content out there. Maybe the solution is this: producers of pro-poor media content need to be networked together, to increase their visibility and lobbying power. CNN IBN is giving us a chance to test out that idea
The poor as Producers as content, not just victimized subjects: over the past two years, we’ve approached maybe a dozen TV stations asking for collaboration. All of them would say, ‘we’d love to do a story ON the Community Producers, but we can’t air a story BY them. What quality will the story have? What does our audience care about a bunch of villagers? Who wants to hear more stories about poverty and human rights problems?’ CNN IBN was the first one to agree that the Producers could MAKE the program. I think this may be one of the first times (in India at least) where the poor have been paid to produce for a leading television station.

CNN IBN is giving us our first step in becoming the “CNN of the base of the pyramid.”

This blog, in particular, would be a great place to address the question of, ‘the poor as producers and not just subjects of the news.” For me and my colleagues, WHO produces the news, is as important as what is being said. So, as long as leaders in the field of democratizing the media remain exclusively English-speaking, Western (or Westernized), middle class and urban, how much change can we really make?

- Jessica

It is only a week or so since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and, in reading the Indian press that expresses such fear of greater instability in their neighboring enemy country, one tends to forget the incredible bonds that hold India and Pakistan together. Stalin and I saw these strong ties over christmas in Kutch, a region that is geographically part of Sindh, a desert tribal heartland (and incidentally the homeland of Benazir Bhutto where she was buried).  On this four day Christmas break, we also saw the power of community media, for Kutch is where Stalin and his colleagues at Drishti and the women’s organization KMVS have been doing community radio for ten years, in which local people have produced an extremely popular program that celebrates local arts and culture.

 THE LAST MUSICIANS

This is Mitha Khan with his teacher and student. These three Muslim men are the last three singers in India of a form of Sufi devotional song called Waai. After bushwacking in a jeep for two hours across the vast desert, we arrived in Mitha Khan’s village, Bhagadia, just before dusk.  Bhagadia is a Jat village, and the Jats are a Muslim nomadic tribe.

The women wear huge noserings that they have to tie up with their hair because of the weight, and they live in platform wooden houses.  As night fell, we crowded into one of their mud huts and the three men treated us to what was quite simply the most extraordinary musical experience of my life. I know next to nothing about sufi music, so I won’t even attempt to describe it. What I will do is make an appeal that this kind of music be preserved. The community radio program already has. Ten years ago, Mr. Khan’s music was featured in the first radio show and broadcast across the state. A few years later, KMVS’ cultural cell made a nine hour recording of their music and have just produced a CD featuring it, the only studio recording of this dying musical tradition.

Mitha Khan showed his passport (which he must have gone to huge lengths to get) to Preeti, the immensely loved manager of the community radio program. The three men are desperate to go to villages that are only a couple hundred kilometers away in Pakistan. They want to play with the other musicians who play their style.  They want to get their instruments fixed and get new ones—they’ve managed to preserve these last two guitar-like instruments for over sixty years since partition cut them off from their tribal brothers, when they somehow landed on this side of the border rather than the other. 

Now that they have their passports, they only need Rs. 60,000 –about $1500—to make the trip. Music lovers or believers in cultural preservation can contact KMVS to contribute to this trip. 

THE FAN OF THE CR PROGRAM

This guy is a truck driver who transports wood across the Rann, (desert) for use in making coal. We passed him on our way to mitha khan’s village, and he pulled over—maybe to gape at the foreigner. “who are you all?” he asked. Parmel, the radio producer with us, told him that we were associated with Ujjass Radio. Had he heard of it? “Yes, of course I know it. I’ve written you lots of letters! I love your programs!’  stalin has often said that the radio program is such a deep institution in the community that they have at least one volunteer or contact for programs in each of the 1000+ villages in Kutch.  All India Radio, on whose airwaves they broadcast, once called them in amazement saying that the KMVS radio serial then being broadcast had gotten more audience letters than any other program in the station’s history, more than 800 letters—and this in an area with less than 1% female literacy.

RURAL SUCCESS STORIES

Habu Bijal is a former Community Radio producer and so we stopped in his village to say hi. How he’s currently making his living is fascinating. Kutch is over-run with a plant called the ‘crazy tree’ that was brought in to stop salinity in the grasslands but instead takes up all the ground water and stops anything else from growing. The government in the last year recently made it legal for villagers to cut down the ‘crazy tree’ to make charcoal. Habu Bijal has started a charcoal business.  He’s bought a truck, and has three employees working for him. He makes almost $300 a month. In every village we went to, we saw three or four pits where people were making charcoal—building files, burying them in mud and dung, and then uncovering charcoal three days later. The next step for local environmentalists is to start a process of converting the land cleared of ‘crazy tree’ back into grasslands—this used to be one of the largest grasslands in asia, attracting herding communities from all over India. Maybe it will be one day soon again. 

 e probably takes inspiration from his mother, also pictured here. She’s a member of KMVS, one of the leaders of one of the most successful grassroots crafts cooperatives that made more than $1 million in sales. We’ll be talking to them as we work out how to make our own community video units sustainable.

Community Producer Neeru was featured on October 21st on Nickelodeon, in a special about Dalit kids. Read about it here.  Neeru, shown here filling out a feedback form at a screening of a community video unit, is one of the all-Dalit community Producers working at Navsarjan’s CVU.

Stalin and I returned to India from six weeks in the States four days ago, to a great scene in Drishti’s office. About a dozen young college students were singing one after the other folk songs from India and the West. They were auditioning for a place in a Peace Film Festival that VV’s partner Drishti puts on. Drishti has been running a Peace Film Festival in Ahmedabad for two years now, the first film festival ever in the entire state of Gujarat with its 60 million people. You can read more about it here.  They show films from around the world on the subject of peace, an important theme in Gujarat which witnessed terrible communal (ie, religiously-based) riots in 2002.  The great thing about this festival is that it is entirely run by youth volunteers, who are part of Drishti’s Nazariya program.  Nazariya runs film clubs in 15 colleges in Ahmedabad, which are really a vehicle to get the polarized youth of the city volunteering, and thinking about peace and identity and who they want to be when they grow up.  These young volunteers run the whole festival themselves, and even select the films.  I’m excited to see what kinds of films these young people select–its safe to say don’t know a whole lot about film festival curating! But that will make it much more interesting and authentically from the perspective of the youth.