I am Anand Pagare, Community Correspondent with Video Volunteers  from Malegaon dist., Maharashta.

Today I was covering the corruption among the traffic police officers in Malegaon town during which I was assaulted by them. Five traffic police officers attacked me, seized my camera, deleted the footage and threw the camera on the street. They accused me of fabricating the news and threatened to end my career if I continued to make videos.

The deleted footage contained evidence of rampant corruption along the daregaon highway, of how the concerned officers let off vehicles and drivers openly flouting traffic rules and regulation after collecting a bribe. The officers would never make a receipt or file a case. The money would go straight into their pockets.

When I attempted to remind the officers of their responsibility, the told me that they were not bound by duty to the citizens or the constitution. They told me that they themselves had paid bribes for their jobs to politicians and higher officers and hence they considered themselves above the law.

This is the day to day reality of Malegaon which is increasingly turning into a lawless state where the police themselves are the goons.

As a common man, I find myself caught helpless in the situation. I cannot fight these goondas on my own.

Please tell me what I can do? And if the police itself is threatening me, who do I rely on for my security.

regards,

Anand Pagare

Community Correspondent, Malegaon

Video Volunteers

Because it can be replicated, is it no longer an innovation?

Replication is very hard, and one of the things that have made it hard for us is the disinterest in funders to fund things that are not new.  Precisely because it can be replicated and scaled, it is no longer an ‘innovation,’ and so funders aren’t interested.

Video Volunteers started a dozen ‘Community Video Units’ with different NGOs in India, all of whom were in essence replicating our idea. There were numerous more NGOs who wanted to start them also, but by this point, the funding for these projects was essentially saturated and so these other NGOs couldn’t get funding to do it.

So we had to switch gears. We thought, okay, if there is no more funding for this kind of project, let’s modify it so we can pitch it again as an innovation – and so we came up with our IndiaUnheard model, where we have about 40 community correspondents working in different districts. It is very like the Community Video Units, but at lower cost and without reliance on NGOs’ success at finding additional funding.

The upside was that this lack of funding forced us to become more cost-effective, and that will in the long run help us scale. I think the whole process of thinking about replicability forces NGOs to think about reducing costs, and that is a good exercise. Read more here.

“As a child, I had experienced untouchability at school where I was forced to sit and eat separately from the children of upper caste families,” says 24-year old Community Correspondent Neeru Rathod from  Gujarat, one of the many trained by Video Volunteers who participated in the project. “We wanted to gives viewers the responsibility, as witnesses, to end this age old oppression once and for all.”

For all those who believe that untouchability practices are a thing of the last century, these videos will relate a different story. On April 14, VV will release at least 20 short videos from across the country that will make it difficult to for anyone to deny the continuance of this inhuman practice. Viewers will be urged to petition the National Commission of Scheduled Caste to take cognizance of these videos as evidence of offenses, and to take all steps to put an end to untouchability practices. In affected communities, Video Volunteers will screen these videos and mobilize people to petition the state offices of the NCSC. Watch a preview video of VV’s ARTICLE 17 Campaign.

Appeal to Rights Activists/Campaigners/Social Sector
We need your help in spreading this message globally so that enough pressure can be built on public institutions like NCSC. Please email your suggestions to Stalink@videovolunteers.org or call him at 99235-94636.

About Video Volunteers
Video Volunteers identifies, trains and empowers grassroots media producers who create change in and for voiceless communities in the developing world. With 100 community producers currently working with salaries, Video Volunteers is one of the largest social change media networks in the world. More than 500 videos on topics like child marriage, temple prostitution, insurgent conflict, atrocities against Dalits and peace between Hindus and Muslims have been produced, and more than 17,000 people have taken direct action after seeing one of our films.

Video Volunteers’ work has received awards or funding from Ashoka, The Knight News Challenge, Echoing Green, TED, UNDP, and many others; our content has been seen on Al Jazeera, NewsX, Nickelodeon, MTV Iggy, as well as in countless villages and slums during night time open air screenings and discussions. Viewers can visit our IndiaUnheard website to watch one new community-produced video posted daily.

After five years of doing community media in India, we’ve come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We’re great at training — the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they’re trained. And we’re great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural India want to see; the evidence for this is that people turn up in large numbers for the screenings and actually take action.

Community producers trying out their camera skills.

The Indian government has several major programs to bring Internet and information to rural areas — one is the Common Service Centers, a program to bring fiber optic cables to every 10th village; another amazing one is the $35 video-enabled tablet computer.

We think these new government programs can give a huge boost to community media in India, and they can help us scale, provided we create the right partnerships. We’re thinking about things like web channels for content aimed at rural audiences for the tablets, and citizen journalism reporting apps. The public screenings on projectors that the people in our Community Video Units do are immensely powerful, but in time, a similar effect will emerge as people are able to share videos in villages over their cell phones and watch them on computers.

So far, these programs are conceived as a way to push information out to the rural areas, so the poor get information on government programs and plans. We come in, because we can reverse the system — we can bring the knowledge and ideas of the poor to the government. We can enable people to produce content for these new distribution pipelines. No one will use them if there is no locally available content.

So when we meet government officials, our message is this: Enabling the poor to produce content, to be heard, and to share their own knowledge is crucial for democracy.

Why funding matters

In Part 1 of this series, I focused on Video Volunteers’ work with IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. But many other projects have kept us busy this year: We did a series of trainings for tribals in Gujarat, India on documenting local culture for a local museum; we provided support to a community radio station called Sramik Bharti; and we launched a very exciting program with UNDP in Eastern UP where 20 rural women are trained to use video to monitor their self-help groups and the use of funds that are earmarked for their investment.

We received visits from Semester at Sea, the University of Nebraska Journalism school, and several Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We spoke about our work and showed our videos in numerous places: the WSSCC international water conference; the Dalit Solidarity Network Conference in Kathmandu; TEDx Mumbai; the India government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting conference; and the University of Nebraska where I was an “Innovator in Residence.”

Funding has continued to be hard, and we haven’t been able to take on as many new community correspondents as we would like, because for the last year we’ve relied a lot on smaller donations that are harder to come by. We find that the obsession with “something new” is making it hard for us to fund projects that we’ve been running for more than a year, such as our Community Video Units program, which is 5 years old.

However, I’ve recently met with several foundations that seem to really see the value in creating a model to bring content out of all rural areas, and so I hope we’ll be able to make the leap from a $300,000-a-year organization (where we’ve been for the last five years) to an organization with twice that budget. As I’ve said in the past, the costs of maintaining rural stringers for all of India are relatively low (around $400,000 a year), and we hope that someone will see the value in being able to make information flow from remote areas in a rational manner.

Watch a few of our best videos from the year:

In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India’s 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human interest content to television stations. The maintenance costs of such a network, once it’s set up, would be relatively low — about $300,000 a year for 645 rural correspondents, or about the cost of 20-30 television producers in Delhi.

Ultimately, we feel that the recruitment, training and generation of impact will need to be supported by philanthropy, but that production and distribution should be taken care of by the market.

We made significant progress in 2011. In May, NewsX, the Indian network, broadcast our 13-part series called “Speak Out India.” We sold them eight stories a week, and they produced a show around it. It was the first time we know of where a mainstream news company has paid for content produced by people living at the so-called base of the pyramid, and the successful run of that show has given us a successful track record with the media. The problem was, they only paid us the stringer rate for the stories, so about 1,500 rupees ($30) when our costs of production are more like 8,000 rupees ($160).

Our next goal was to see if an Indian TV channel would sign a contract with us for a similar amount of content each week (about 30 minutes) at our fully loaded cost of production for a 3-minute story. Hence, Video Volunteers’ earned income goal for the end of this year was $100,000, or about 40% of our total budget. This would still be significantly lower than the costs of a TV station doing these stories themselves.

In the last three months, we’ve made two trips to Delhi and Mumbai to meet the TV channels, and the response has been very enlightening. So far, we’ve met about half of the top 20 English or Hindi news channels. They all like the content. They find our community correspondents full of energy, and feel that our flip cams are generating adequate quality.

The fact that India is in the throes of an anti-corruption movement is a really good thing for us, because we have lots of great corruption stories that they want. So far so good, in that they clearly are saying, “We’ll run this content.” This is a big step from a few years ago, where everyone we spoke to said we were crazy to think TV stations would run stuff produced by poor villagers.

Jessica Mayberry with tribal community media producers in Andhra Pradesh, India.

The Rural Newswire

As for the idea of a “rural newswire,” they also get the concept. One senior person at CNN IBN said, “It’s a well-known secret in Indian media that abysmal stringers are a huge problem.” The chief executive of CNN IBN has talked in media interviews (including when he’s been interviewed about Video Volunteers) about the “tyranny of distance,” and how the remote areas of the country are often prohibitively expensive to cover. Someone at a government channel even told us that our idea couldn’t work with the government channel “because all our stringers are political appointees!”

But despite all this, we’re not sure they’re ready to pay for quality. One producer at a news channel here who was really championing us internally said, “I’m pitching this as a high-quality stringers network. Everyone knows our stringers are awful, but the problem is they are OK with bad quality.”

Bottom line at the end of our first 10 TV station meetings: Stations will take our stuff for free. They would probably also pay us the stringer rate — but not necessarily the fully loaded cost. So now we’re working with one station that’s going to try to find a corporate sponsor, and will probably be the first mainstream media contract to materialize for us next year.

Online Distribution Helps

Thankfully, the Internet is a space where we can produce and publicize our content without depending on a broadcaster. We are currently publishing one video a day on our site, which is searchable by issue, region and community correspondent. The good news is that we’ve doubled our viewers over the last six months. The less good news is that the numbers are still low. We’re going to start tweaking our format to show the back story and the trials and tribulations of the community producers more.

We’ve set aside one day a week, Wednesday, to publish impact videos — this will have an impact on us in terms of fundraising! And we hope to start producing our own podcasts where we club together videos on a particular theme and have someone in our office as an anchor. We now have more than 450 edited 3-minute videos on every conceivable issue of human rights, poverty alleviation, and local culture. We’re sitting on a gold mine of content, and now the fun starts of repackaging it and seeing what themes emerge and getting others to comment on the content.

We’re confident this will work, because when our content is on other platforms that get traffic, it does very well. We’re now partnered with several online companies, namely MSN, Rediff, Viewspaper and ViewChange.org. The partnership with Rediff is particularly promising; our first video with it got 100,000 views and loads of comments.

We also reach greater numbers of people through commissioned film projects. We’ve been hired this year by several organizations to gather stories or footage, such as: the one day on Earth project; YouTube’s Day in a Life project; and the Red Cross, for whom we produced 12 videos on hunger in rural India that they’re using in campaign events around the world. We’ve also gathered stories of climate change for our partner organization Laya; stories of development-induced displacement for Witness; stories on domestic violence for Breakthrough; and on local farming for the Gene Campaign.

Our correspondents gathered “recce” footage on caste for one of India’s major production companies, and got answers from dozens of people to the question, “Are You Happy?” for a film project replicating Jean Rouch’s seminal 1961 movie “Chronicle of Summer.”

Are you happy? – from Jharkhand from Video Volunteers on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for our fourth and last post of the blog series, in which we’ll discuss our other activities and programs and our vision for the future.

(This blog first appeard on PBS Media Lab)

Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned.

Video Volunteers’ community correspondents focus on activism.

Incentives work

In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting “impact.” (To us, “impact” means that the community correspondent is able to resolve the problem the video addresses.) We told them we had decided to incentivize impact.

They would be paid 5,000 rupees (approximately $100) — more than twice the regular stipend — for an “impact video,” which means they would make a video; show it locally to get the issue solved; and make another documenting that process and proving the impact actually took place — and for that second video, they would get the 5,000 rupees.

Some amazing impacts happened this year: In Orissa, illegal timber smugglers were stopped by local villagers. In Mumbai, a factory was forced to clean its pollution. In Assam, politicians released desperately needed water to villagers. Rather than be turned away, Dalit children got help in village child centers. Expectant mothers received folic acid which had previously been withheld. And, in one area, some 600 women for the first time were paid minimum wage.

These are just some of our stories. You can watch our impact videos here.

Recruitment is challenging

Our goal is to have 645 community correspondents, or one in every district of India. We had to think hard about how we could quickly scale up if we needed to.

Our first two rounds of recruitment for IndiaUnheard was through our existing network. We sent emails asking people to nominate someone from the villages they work in and then to help them fill out the online application. We got a few hundred applications that way and thought we could keep doing it like that. But when we tried for the third round, the number of eligible applications was low (though the overall applications were higher than previous years). Maybe we had tapped out our existing network.

So how could we quickly scale up? Possibly through big non-profit institutions (like microfinance). We are reaching out to them now.

Choose the right geographies

For our first two rounds, our goal was to get one or two people in every state. Now that we’ve almost done that, we’re going to focus on key regions we feel are “unheard.”

Last month, we took about 20 new community correspondents from Jharkhand. We chose Jharkhand because it is part of the so-called Red Corridor where there is a Maoist insurgency taking place. In the future, we’ll look at the North East where other separatist movements are taking place, and Kashmir. (Those two areas were out of our budget this year.)

My colleagues Kamini Menon and Stalin K. spent two weeks traveling around this area meeting the activists and doing the recruitment; this live recruitment is making recruitment easier and will also make retention higher because the 13 new correspondents, each representing one district in the same state, can support each other.

Partnerships are challenging

Two years ago, when our Community Video Units were our primary focus, we felt that we could scale this network through investments from NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We’ve realized that co-ownership is very difficult and can at times be a hindrance to innovation.

We now feel that we can scale better through partnerships with the mainstream media, rather than NGOs, and so for that reason, a huge focus this year has been on ensuring the content can work for both a local community and outside audience.

From our Community Video Units, we’ve learned a few other things: One is that a model where people are paid only when they perform is better than the Community Video Units model, in which the six or seven people who work together on a film are given a monthly wage.

Women produce more

Two observations we are thrilled to see: Women produce more, and retention is higher with the underprivileged. It suggests that journalism really is an appropriate livelihood for the poor. We started to see that with online recruitment, we had selected certain people whose incomes were clearly higher than they had told us on the phone. Live recruitment in extremely remote areas of Jharkhand will help get the correct balance.
The amount they can produce is low

We ask correspondents to produce two videos a month. They produce on average one or less. One reason is that being a journalist is difficult; it takes a lot of personal courage to confront officials and ask people private questions. They can spend a whole day on a bus getting to an official who then won’t see them. They have to take care of their families, too.

I learned this year about the concept of “businesses in a box” and franchises, such as rural women selling solar lamps or soap sachets, and I discovered that we should make the process as simple and step-by-step as possible.

But journalism is simply harder than selling soap. We also ask them to produce tough stories that they have to research and which take time, unlike stringers, who are told to “go film this event and send us the footage.” This means that our “cost per story” is higher than we would like. But we also aren’t taking huge steps to increase their productivity right now, because we don’t yet have enough buyers to support a huge level of production.

Choose the right people to train

The fact that we put such effort in selecting interesting people to train is a huge asset for us. Our new batch of correspondents includes people whose personal stories are, in some ways, the story. We have two boys from Kashmir who have seen the insurgency; a young man whose sister was the first dowry death in his state; women who have experienced sexual violence and have the courage to speak about it; and a good representation from the North East, including one young man who got the first footage of a particular insurgent camp because he’s from that area.

In our training, we teach them that their power as a community correspondent will come through using their personal experiences and connections to the issues. This is what they have that no professional, no outsider, can ever replicate. They learn that they themselves must speak out, and speak personally, if they want their communities to do so, too.

Good training is not necessarily scalable. (That’s another thing that we learned in 2011 — that the training aspects of our work will always be expensive because education doesn’t have a lot of economies of scale.) But it is the most valuable investment.

You can watch a video from our trainings here:

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, which will focus on our modes of online and offline distribution and our experience with earning income from partners and the mainstream media.

(This Blog first appeared on PBS Idea Lab)

The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone — a local changemaker — who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It’s commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that “everyone” can now be a producer.

At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It’s now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has ambitious programs to bring the Internet into the villages.

Everything seems set for a mass of content to be coming out of rural areas — which brings us to our problem: the fact that it is not.

The mere presence of information technology, like the 800 million cell phone connections in India, does not ensure local content creation. If you search the names of most remote Indian villages on YouTube, nothing will appear. If you search them on Google itself, never mind YouTube, most of what appears is raw government data. Content is produced by a small group of people, and the world’s poor, in particular, are producing virtually zero digital content. Content continues to be made by the “drivers” for the “driven.”

Video Volunteers is seeking to change this one-sided status quo; we’re posing as a question the statement with which I started this post: What would it take for every village in the developing world to have someone — a local changemaker — who broadcasts that village’s issues to the world? How can one provide the training, support and human connection for some of the world’s most underprivileged communities to feel that their voice matters?

Over the last year, we’ve re-strategized our programs and revamped our business model in the search for a truly scalable model of community media. As part of a 4-part series, I’ll be sharing what we’ve done over the last year, our experiences, and what we’ve learned. This has relevance to people interested in numerous issues, from improving the quality of journalism, to understanding how communications between government and its citizens can be two-way rather than one way, and increasing the quantum of good ideas the world has for tackling poverty.

In this post, Part 1, I’ll be giving a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. In Part 2, I will share what we learned in 2011 on how to make community media a sustainable enterprise. Part 3 details our distribution plans and strategies to earn revenue from the mainstream media. Part 4 looks toward the future.

A network of community correspondents

IndiaUnheard is Video Volunteers’ network of community correspondents. In February 2011, we took in our second batch of IndiaUnheard community correspondents, bringing the total number of community correspondents to 52, 45 of which are still with us. They now cover 24 states in India and 45 districts.

The basic model is as follows:

• We recruit grassroots activists through a network of social movements and NGOs (non-governmental organization.)

• The basic criterion is that the candidates be economically poor and also have a history of volunteerism and a strong sense of belonging to their community. This is to ensure that they’ll stay committed to producing the videos of the stories their communities say need to be told.

• We only work with socially marginalized and oppressed communities — Dalit, Tribal, religious and sexual minorities, and women.

• We train them for two weeks at an intensive training camp in video activism, journalism ethics, and television news-style production.

• We give them each a low-cost HD video camera. Cisco has recently donated 500 of them, and we are very excited.

• They return to their villages and produce at least two videos a month.

• They come up with stories from their own village and in neighboring villages in their district.

• They each work with a mentor in the Video Volunteers office. Every senior staff member mentors 5-7 community producers, advising them once a week by phone on their stories.

• They shoot their stories, go to an Internet cafe, and transfer the footage to DVD, which they snail-mail us to our office in Goa.

• It’s an entrepreneurial model where they are paid on a per-video basis. We pay them what we know the Indian media pays its stringers, or its local freelance reporters.
  A team of editors in the office edit the stories.

• They are then posted on our “website:”http://www.indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org where we broadcast one video a day, accompanied by an article, which is generally written by a research intern.

Once the video is online, the community correspondent can download it from the Internet and start using it to get an impact in her village. Meanwhile, from our office, we can start the next level of distribution to mainstream media and other NGOs.

In the longer term, this low-cost, innovative model is a way for every village in the developing world to have someone trained to use the latest technologies to advocate for their rights. There are now video-enabled cell phones in all corners of the world, and a model like IndiaUnheard can enable these technologies to be used to capture human rights violations and bring them to the attention of the world.

Here’s a video compiling different sound bites from the community correspondents. You can watch more videos here.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, in which we’ll discuss what we’ve learned about what makes community media a sustainable enterprise.

(This blog first appeared at PBS Idea Lab)

“When I am speaking for the dalit, I am a dalit activist. When I am speaking for sexual minorities and women, I am a gender activist. When I’m reporting a gross violation of human rights, I am a human rights activist. And when I have a camera in my hand, I am a videoactivist.”

If ever the world started turning to the perfect harmonious tune of humanity, justice and equality, Varsha Jawalgekar hopes to become a poet and a painter. Until then she would prefer to dabble in the arts whenever she has the time and the inclination. Until then she has a lot on her mind.

Varsha is first and foremost an activist, the kind of relentless crusader for community and society who has decided to spend every living moment working for her fellow people. She has been associated with various people’s movements since the age of 14. She is now the leader of a people’s movement called ‘Parivartan Janandolan’ which she founded with the vision of organizing Dalit, Muslim and other women from marginalized communities and religions in the Vaishali district of Bihar to fight for and achieve their rights. It is her conduit to the grassroots of the nation, into the hearts and minds of her community and her people. This is where she belongs.

Varsha is part of a network of citizen journalists from across the country called IndiaUnheard, a hyperlocal news feature service which reports everyday from some of the most remote corners of the country. She is the Community Correspondent representing the communities in Vaishali district. In her hands, the camera becomes a tool for her activism. She uses it to document, archive and intervene in local issues.

In a recent incident, the damning footage that she captured of the corruption by a public distribution system official was used as evidence to get the official suspended. People who have suffered silently for years have opened up to her camera and Varsha has managed to share these powerful stories with the world. The videos give her access to a larger, global platform. Thousands of people across the world watch her videos. Her voice has bypassed and breached the narrow confines of the mainstream media and speaks out for some of society’s most disadvantaged individuals.

“My work as a grassroots activist and my work as a Community Correspondent are mutually inclusive,” says Varsha. “They are not in conflict which the other but each is tool and a step towards my ultimate vision of justice and equality.”

If Varsha rejects easy categories, she credits it to the life she has lived. Born in a middle class family in the Latur district of Maharashtra, she reckons that her activism was born early when the women in her house used ask her to help mediate their domestic issues. But it was the earthquake of 1993 which ravaged her district that shook her to the core. “It was an earthquake in mind,” she says. Barely 14, she volunteered as a humanitarian aid worker at ground zero and she was made responsible for the assessment of loss.

“It was a very sensitive time. I was meeting people who had lost almost everything they had lived for,” she recollects. “I worked among the community; I was studying and gradually understanding their loss. But at the time, I was witness to the corruption in the government. I understood the misery of being the underprivileged and I resolved that I would do something about it. It was a time of my social awakening.”

Varsha then joined a local people’s movement by the name of Bharath Gyan Vigyan Samuday which used a science based approach in dealing with issues of education, awareness and health among marginalized communities. All through her university years, Varsha describes herself as being in the constant process of participation and learning. She describes these years as the formative experience of her life, the time when she began to feel the call from within. Even after she completed her masters and became a lecturer she continued volunteering with NGOs and people’s movements until one day when she made the decision to forego her career as take the plunge into full-time activism.

She completed an 18 month course at the National Centre for Advocacy Studies and decided to travel across the country. During her travels, she found that Bihar beckoned. She loved the place and the people as much as she decided that her work was needed there.

“Bihar was the place where Buddha was born. It was a place of learning and ancient universities. Vaishali was the seat of the world’s oldest republic,” says Varsha. “But inspite of this culture and history of enlightenment, Bihar seemed to be moving steadily into the dark. It was poor and undeveloped. The caste system was rigid and there was little tolerance. The marginalized had no access to health, sanitation, education, justice and other basic amenities. The very land that they lived on was being snatched from beneath their feet. Worst of all, they had no voices. I realized that this must be the place where I have to do my work.”

She lived among the people. As a woman she had access to spaces that men couldn’t venture like the kitchen of a dalit woman. She stayed in the villages to weeks on end. She studied their issues first hand  and began to speak to the women about their rights. It was a gradual process but she stuck to her vision and a movement was born. In the process, Varsha found her community.

“The older people and the younger, the men and the women, all call me ‘didi’ (elder sister),” says Varsha “Every time I visit their villages, they say that didi has returned back to her ‘naiher’ (the matriarchal native place).”

When she looks back now, Varsha confesses to feeling a degree of surprise as to where she has reached in this one life but she credits every experience- good and bad, that helped her make the person that she is-an activist, a woman, a poet, a painter and everybody’s didi.

“I prefer the word ‘manvi’ to describe myself. It simply means a ‘human being’.”

Today, IndiaUnheard publishes a special video that chronicles our Community Correspondent Devidas’ attempt to organize a community screening in his village in Cotigaon, South Goa.  “When people watch my videos on the internet, most viewers are those who have an interest in the issue. They watch it, register it and then let it be. Then there are some who are interested in it for research reasons. For some others, it is just a news bulletin. But more or less, there is not going to be any change and impact for my people on whom the videos are made. The only people who can make the change possible are my people themselves and for my people to watch the videos in their own communities, I had to organize a community screening,” says Devidas. The following is an in-depth account of the screening, of how four 3 minute videos created an atmosphere of joy, hope, redemption and change in a tiny village situated deep in the forests of Goa……

The Community Correspondent

Wednesday, 28th of September 2011. Devidas Gaonkar, tribal activist and IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent from South Goa, was up early, preparing for his day of reckoning. For last the one and a half years he had acquitted himself as a ‘correspondent’ producing videos on controversial issues like illegal mining and the toll it was taking on the land and its people, the illegal cutting of trees in the jungles, land grabs and forced evictions, politically motivated murders of tribal leaders and vivid snapshots of tribal life and customs. But today was the day he would embrace the ‘community’ aspect in full measure.

The people whose lives and concerns he had captured in his videos would finally be seeing his work. The people of his village, predominantly tribal and altogether marginalized from the mainstream, would be seeing themselves and their lives portrayed by one of their own. The videos had been seen by thousands on the internet, all across the world but today it was being screened in a remote tribal community, deep in lush, deep jungles of South Goa cut away from civilization where even the most wide-spread mobile phone networks fail to register even a single bar. It was a blip on the dark side of the digital divide but this was home. This was Devidas’ Community.

“Some people in the village couldn’t make sense of what I was upto with my camera going around the village, recording footage and interviewing people. They were suspicious at first and later, they just dismissed me as a madman,” says Devidas. “Today they will get their first insights into my work as an IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent. I am tense but tremendously excited.”

The Community

Cotigaon in Southern Goa is an idyllic collective of 12 tribal settlements of which Devidas’ was one. Closer to the neighbouring state of Karnataka that any Goan city or town, enclosed by the fencing which declares the jungle a protected sanctuary, at first glance it seems to be a village tucked away and untouched by the ways of the rest of the world and the tides of globalisation and development. But, as always, the closer one looks, there is more than meets the eye.

The world has been moving in or rather encroaching and increasingly, in the last few years. Mining companies and their heavy equipment have already laid to ruin some of the surrounding forest area. The declaration of the protected Jungle land around the village has sequestered them and caused them to drastically change their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life. Old lands, freedoms, livelihoods and traditions are being lost. They are caught in a nexus between a corrupt government, the mining barons, the mafia and the mainstream media. And as the pressure builds up, there is no one, no press, no media, no platform for them to speak out from. Failing to make sense of the situation they are in and the wider world outside, the people and especially the youth are growing increasingly disillusioned

“I was initially employed in a mainstream newspaper. I used to write stories about the problems of my community but the newspaper never carried those articles. That’s when I lost faith in the mainstream media,” says Devidas. “Mainstream news is not interested in change. It is interested in selling and keeping the higher ups and the money safe, secure and circulating.”

The Day of the Screening

Devidas and veteran Community Video Unit producer from Gujarat, Girsh Jadhav had their work cut out for them. That day selected for the screening was also a festive occasion for the tribals of the village. It was the auspicious day of ‘Usthan’, a harvest festival. The people allow the trees to flower and fruit undisturbed all through the monsoons until this day when the local deities are first appeased. Only after various rituals do the people begin to pick fruit from the trees.

The rituals were scheduled to end by four in the evening after which the screening would begin. Devidas and Girish went door to door inviting the people of the screenings. They hung around the temple and the village crossroads talking to the passer-bys and asking them to spread the word to assemble in the evening at the Bus Depot, selected location for the screening and also the centre of the village.

“Most people were just surprised at what we were telling them but they were some who insisted I was clinically insane. I thought it best not to bother with that. In a few hours, they would know exactly what they were missing out on.”

The Great White Bus

Meanwhile a bus of Video Volunteers staff and IndiaUnheard Community Correspondents who had assembled in Goa for the 3rd Training Camp were snaking their way through the mud road towards Cotigaon. They had been wandering lost with no mobile signal to call and confirm direction. Half a dozen cell phones were reaching out of the windows hoping to catch an elusive bar. They had been on the road for three hours plus, moving from interior to interior from tar road to loose mud, through small towns and fields into jungles. This old white bus did not know yet that it was to play that it was to play a central part in the screening.

When the bus arrived, the Usthan rituals were over but there was an hour yet for the screenings. As usual, it was the children of the village who assembled first. “The excitement always begins with the children,” says Girish. “In such situations, you can count on them more than any adult.”

While the sound and other equipment were being set-up, the youths of the village turned up to lend a helping hand. Wires were connected and cross-connected. The sound came first. It began booming throughout the village; one of Oscar winning music director A.R. Rehman’s finest tunes began to play electric. It announced that the festivities for the day were not over as yet. Assemble everyone, there is more to go. It’s not over till the projector keeps on shining.

And now the big question- what would it shine on? Where do we hang the white sheet?

Many suitable locations were experimented with but it was always one shadow askew until the team hit upon the idea- Why not use the bus? The youth clambered over the heavy vehicle and a great white sheet was hung from the great white bus.

And Then it Began

The entire village – women, men and children, a crowd of over 250 had assembled in front of the tiny bus depot. Devidas Gaonkar, Community Correspondent stepped in front the mike. He welcomes his people, and thanks them for assembling.

“There are four videos I have for you today,” says Devidas. “The voices you will hear are your voices. The pictures you will see are pictures of you and this community. It will be your sisters, mothers, brothers, sons and neighbours speaking about us. These videos are made by me who was born and brought up in this very community. You have never seen anything like this in your TVs and news channels. This white sheet behind me is our channel and for the next hour, I welcome you to watch and talk about the news from this community.”

Four videos were screened. The first screened was a colourful video that captures the sounds and sights of the local festival ‘Dhillo’. It was celebrated by women who take time off from their daily grind to dance, play and make merry. Recognising themselves and their locales in the video, the crowd went ecstatic. “They couldn’t believe that they were on the big screen. It all seemed so immediate,” says Devidas. A local woman who appeared in the video took over the mike and appealed to the youth to participate and keep the joy and colour of the festival alive. “Traditions are part of our identity, of our tribal-ness, of our way of communicating with the world around us.”

With the first video getting a tremendous response, the second one was screened which spoke out against the brutal murder of two tribal activists. The crowd was lulled to a silence and one could feel the tension creeping up. The mainstream media had covered the issue but it all seemed so far away, so second hand. In the community screening, the effect was immediate, almost disorienting. As the issue was sensitive, the screening was allowed to pass with no comment but there was denying that the crowd had just witnessed something powerful.

The third video struck a raw nerve with the youth of the village. In the video, Devidas spoke about the problems tribal students faced when they are forced to shift from Marathi as the language of instruction in school to English in college. This sudden shift causes many tribal students to drop out of education every year. “More than that.” says Devidas. “When I was young, it made me feel ashamed to be a tribal.” Many of young people of the village came forward and shared their stories on the mike. They were hesitant at first but once they found their articulation, it was powerful. Their voices had the impression of the coming out of a strong emotion that they had long suppressed. Now, they were finding the right words and the right place to speak out.

After the fever of third video was contained, the fourth was screened which appealed to all the villagers to stop the cutting of trees in the forest for firewood and asked them to switch to biogas for fuel. A prominent villager who had installed solar panels in his house was invited to speak to people on the many advantages of sustainable energy. Devidas explained to the villagers about how they could contact the local Agricultural office if they were interested in biogas and offered to help them through the process. With a long discussion on various energy alternative and how the village could avail of it, the screening came to an end.

So, How was the Screening?

“We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s fantastic. We never knew it was so powerful. I can’t believe I saw myself on TV,” came the replies.

“And do you think Devidas is still a madman?”

The people laughed but it had been long day for Devidas Gaonkar and he had come out sane.

There were a few walkouts. There were still more than few non-believers. But the fact remains that after the screening, the villagers have started negotiating with the agricultural department for biogas plants in every house. Devidas thinks it should come through successfully by the end of December or early January.  Meanwhile, he was recently invited by the Forest Department to talk about sustainable energy to school children. He also produced a new video on the rivers of South Goa which are being polluted by mining waste and another one, on the subsidised computers that the Government of Goa distributed to the public which last no more than a month.

Is he not afraid of taking on the opponents that even the mainstream media shies away from?

“Mainstream news is not interested in change. It is interested in selling, in keeping the status quo of the higher ups, the middle class, the poor and the marginalized. It is a good structure that keeps the money coming through. They have clearly defined boundaries. Poor people and the underprivileged are always the victims. Because sympathy sells and it sells easy. People watch it and once they’ve had their fill, they change the channel or turn off the TV.”

“Community media is not about victims, it is about people who want to bring change. It is not far away, it is immediate. There is an implicit responsibility towards people, issues, communities, lives, change and the truth. It is this responsibility that inspires me and keeps me going. I’m standing up against the big guys, because I am standing up for my community.”

The Journey Back and The Journey Forward

After the white sheet was off, dinner was had and the great white bus got on the road for the three hour journey back to civilization. Inside the bus were over 30 Community Correspondents from across the nation. Most had experienced their first community screening.  They had seen faces lit up in the dark, the community embracing the videos, how the people were inspired and spoke out for change, how a faint facsimile of a revolution seemed to break out as the videos were being discussed.

In a week they would all be back to their homes, each in remote corner of India. Now, they knew exactly what they had to do.