The impact story comes at a time when community media is just starting to gain ground in India because mainstream media is widely seen as obsessed with TRP ratings and advertisement revenues.  But when met with these facts, the media players hit back with ‘will such media work?’

Well this story presents the proof that it does.

This video was shown on IndiaUnehard website on 24th May. As a fellow community member, Daniel had been witnessing the plight of the villagers of Bongli – the village with no healthcare – for years. He was pained to see the poor villagers being forced to use herbs and faith healing to take care of their sick and even the dying. To reach the nearest public health centre they would have  to trek a distance of 10 km  through dense forest and hills.

Within a week of the publication of the video, IndiaUnheard team was contacted by Devakishor Soraisam – a member of a Human Rights organization called the Burning Voices. They were deeply moved by video and would like to reach out the villagers, they said. Would IndiaUnheard help them?

When told of this, Daniel was overjoyed. In mid-June Daniel met the Ronid and Devakishor – representatives of Burning Voices who had brought with them a carload of medicines for villagers of Bongli. It was a moving sight when Daniel went to the village with the donors and distributed these medicines in the village, as well as other neighbouring villages that needed it.

Says Daniel, “I joined IndiaUnheard because we had no media telling out stories and covering our issue. So IndiaUnheard was a platform where I could share our stories. But now, it has become the forum where we can make changes. I have just turned from a story teller to a change maker. It feels great!”

The video, thus has created 3-fold impacts.

1.         It made possible for over 500 people access healthcare in more than one village which had no hospital, no medicine whatsoever.

2.         The video inspired locals take action to find solution to local problems

3.         The video has, deepened faith of the correspondent and the whole community into the power of community produced media.

The skeptics of people-powered media can take a re-look at their own thoughts.

Meanwhile, community reporters like Daniel should take a bow.

The goal of the project ‘Life in a Day’ is to create a single day’s snapshot of life on earth, in order to leave a message for future generations to tell and show our grandchildren and great grandchildren what life was like on an ordinary day in 2010.

For this project, VV partnered with Bangalore-based media production house Ixoraa Media. Ixoraa media approached us after learnt of our work  from Technology Entertainment and Design(TED).  TED, of which VV’s  founder director Jessica Mayberry is a Fellow, had suggested that if Ixoraa was looking for community-produced content, then Video Volunteers, with it’s countrywide network of Community correspondents, had the best capability of  providing  a done day’s captured snapshot of life  in India.

The entire project was done in less than a week’s notice – a huge challenge, considering almost all of our correspondents were based in remote areas where communication facilities are poor. Since this was peak of monsoon, weather was another concern as poor light and rain posed serious hurdles for the correspondents. Yet all the 15 correspondents, some of who learnt of the project only on 23^rd July, managed to complete their videos within the steep deadline of 24^th July. In fact each correspondent was enthusiastic about shooting the video. The reason: It was an opportunity to profile their community.

However, since India is a multilingual society, there was a big concern of translating the conversations between the CCs and their community members.  To deal with this, the CCs were given a set of questions that they would ask to each person they interviewed.

The questions they asked were these:

Tell me about yourself (Work, education, life)

What or whom they love?

What they are afraid of?

What makes them laugh?

What is in their pocket or bag today?

To answer these questions, 15 community correspondents chose people of 15 professions who, when put together, present a vibrant montage of the diverse means of livelihood that Indians follow.

Here they are at a glance

A milk man who sells milk door to door,

A Transgender person, performing on street,

School and college going students Govt employee,in the conventional ‘sarkari’ office

An apple farmer in his orchard

Shepherd and Goatherd boys, tending their cattle

A barber

An ironsmith

A laundryman

A tea seller

A Chaat (snack) Stall worker

A Paan(betel nut) Stall worker

An electrician

A traditional craftsman A vegetable vendor

For VV, the project “Life in a Day” project was a good way to learn 3 important facts:

1.Our wide community outreach – we were able to speak to sixteen community representatives in fourteen states within three days and document their daily activities

2. We have the logistics and skill to complete a project in short notice.

3. Our community reporters are able to recognize their communities’ forgotten members – goatherds and paan stall workers.

According to Youtube, eighty thousand videos, amounting 4,600 hours of footage have been submitted to “Life in a Day” project.  While editing of the huge amount of footage will take quite some time, the individual submissions, including those from VV will be available for viewing soon. Youtube is building a special gallery, created to feature ‘Life in a Day’ channel which will show all the videos once the site goes live in September.

The TED talk of Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the international blogging site Global Voices, is quite an amazing insight into the challenges of telling international stories online, told in the great TED way of painting lots of pictures and using a ton of anecdotes. He says it’s a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries – when we’re on the web, we’re basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/nonprofits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has got some great powerpoint slides that add a lot of meat to the arguments.

In addition to giving us some very telling facts (did you know that Madagascar the movie is a bigger brand than Madagascar the country?), he talks about translation. And not just the challenges of literal translation from one language to another, which is something Video Volunteers faces in our work all the time, especially now when we have community video correspondents working in nearly every state of India, a country with dozens of official languages. But also cultural translation.

He makes the point that we need more “deejays… skilled human curators” who can speak the language of the west and of other cultures at the same time. The incredible editors at Global Voices fit that bill, and so does the blog Afrigadget. Video Volunteers, in the articles that accompany the online videos made by our community correspondents in our new IndiaUnheard Community News Network, attempt to do this too.

This is really interesting to me because at Video Volunteers, we talk a lot about the need for “unmediated” voices – essentially, voices that are not culturally translated. This is one of the differences between community video, which to us means equipping traditionally “unheard” communities to tell their stories in their own words, and documentary film, where a professional uses his or her artistry and insightfulness to translate community voices for outside audiences.

At VV, we believe, in fact, that so much is lost in translation that you want to keep “cultural translation” to a minimum. And so, with our newly launched IndiaUnheard community news network, we want to bring voices out voices in their rawest form. As my partner Stalin K. often says, “if I say the words “masai warrior” you get an immediate visual in your head. You don’t, in a similar fashion, hear their voices in your head.” We know from TV what the Masai look like. But we don’t know what they sound like, because in traditional National Geographic-type media, we just see the Masai with a narration – their whole culture, never mind their language, is translated for an international audience.

There are real limits to the possibilities for translation. As I’ve heard Ethan Zukerman himself say at a Civic Media conference, it’s hard enough to find cultural translators for English to other cultures. But what about all the learning that could happen between the readers of, say, Kurdish media in New York City and Haitian media in New York City? How is that translation going to happen? I don’t know that we could ever have enough translators to solve that problem.

So how do we get people to watch – rather, to WANT to watch – videos like these two posted below, made by our IndiaUnheard correspondents? If the world had an ideal system for the poor representing themselves in the media, which I would say is something like one community journalist per village (or even per 20 villages), how would we interest people outside those villages in watching this content?

Here are two recent videos to check out and see what you think: Children Carry Trash, Not Books

The video shows how children of poor families do not benefit from the current schemes on compulsory free education. The video is produced by Pratibha Rolta, a Community Correspondent from the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, who works as an activist on women’s issues.

The second video, titled Children Denied Education captures the plight of child labourers in Haryana’s brick kilns who are deprived of several rights including education.

The correspondent here, Satyawan was a Sarpanch (village head) for five long years before joining IndiaUnheard and has in-depth knowledge of corruption within the local administration.

Besides our own website and within the communities where the producers work (where most of our work is shown) there are some forums for videos like this. I showed these two videos two weeks ago as a panelist at the IFP/UN-sponsored “ENVISION 2010: Addressing Global Issues through Documentaries“, an event organized by the IFP, UN Communications Department, and New York Times. This was a one day conference on education and documentary films, and happily, there was space for user-created content. A few years ago there probably wouldn’t have been. I was on a panel about the impact of user-generated media, along with with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, John Kennedy of World Without Borders and Ryan Schlieff of Witness – all good friends in the field of media and human rights. People in the world of documentary film, or in the UN sector with its huge budgets for traditional communications, were getting a taste of what’s possible when you turn the camera over to communities. This is a progress towards receptiveness to these voices.

With our work, I take a long term perspective. (Wanting every village in the world to have someone skilled and motivated to represent his neighbors’ concerns in the media kind of requires that!) I think that media preferences are not fixed in stone. What Americans liked on TV and in the movies in the fifties is different from what we liked in the seventies and today. Who knows where people’s tastes will be twenty years from now? I’m an optimist. I think we will only get more global and more curious, and more open to raw, unfiltered reality. I believe there are even studies that show that kids today who’ve grown up with mashups and social networks are much more open to gritty media their parents wouldn’t look at. In the meantime, we keep telling our correspondents to tell their stories in their own words, with their own style, their own analysis, no matter how challenging it may be for outsiders to understand without translation.

Wokha of Nagaland is just another hill town of the North Eastern India with the usual picture of poor civic facilities and rich tribal traditions. Like the rest of the region, people here are emotional about three things – forest, land and ethnic traditions. And like the rest of the state, people in Wokha too are supportive of the Naga’s struggle for self rule – often marred with violence – which has been going for several decades now.

Ironic, therefore, is the fact that, despite the decade-long fierce struggle to save their tribal identity and refusal to be ‘Indianised’, Wokha, quite like the rest of the state is today having a unique scenario where the young generation is under a spell of Korean culture.

While it is difficult to date back the advent of Korean culture precisely, by 2007 it had already been around for long enough for the government of Nagaland to have included Korean wrestling and songs in the annual Hornbill Festival.
Breaking this incomprehensible silence, one IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent from Wokha filed a story on this Korean invasion.  Shot on streets of Wokha, the video report of Renchano Humtsoe captures the disturbing trend of unquestioningly accepting all things Korean by the younger Naga population.

Breaking this barrier of this incomprehensible silence, one IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent from Wokha filed a story on this silent Korean cultural invasion. Shot on streets of Wokha, the video report of Renchano Humtsoe, titled Wave of Korean Culture Hits Nagaland captures the disturbing trend of accepting all things Korean by young Naga population, without a question.

Says Renchano,“ I always felt, this isn’t normal that everyone is adopting Korean style and Korean culture so much. But I wasn’t sure if that’s worth making a news story because nobody seemed to talk about it.”

However, once Renchano’ story was done, there was more revelation made by IndiaUnheard’s other correspondents from the region: From Ukhrul of Manipur to Itanagar of Arunachal Pradesh, the influence of Korean culture has been growing at an alarming speed. In fact in Manipur the insurgents have banned Hindi films which has, in turn, thrown the gate wider for Korean consumer goods and films and videos to flood the state.

A Kamei, a journalist with AIR stationed in Imphal does not at all find the advent of Korean culture surprising. She says, “People always liked non-Indian things here. So we were anyway using non-Indian products. Korean products are just an extension. In fact Koreans are so similar to us, specially the way we look.”

As I watched Renchano’s video, it sparked a number of questions: How do the Korean consumer goods manage to reach the market so easily? Why do the cable operators subscribe to Arirang TV? Why did people choose to prefer Korea over Thai, Taiwanese or, for that matter, any other Asian country of the region? Why people who are so vocal against Hindi, have no issues with the Korean?

But above all, the story makes me wonder why the media, which is always so quick to point out the foreign invasion of any kind, especially in the region, is so silent about this overwhelming influence of Korean cultural especially on their young generation?

These are questions that will be pondered over by many in coming days. Meanwhile, reporters like Renchano should take a bow for bringing forth a story that has gone unheard for a long time.

Goa, primarily known as a land of sand and sun, also has some beautiful forests.  Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary in Cancona of South Goa is one of them.  For centuries, this forest has been the home of hundreds of Velip tribals. Devidas Gaonkar, a Community Correspondent is one of them.

In recent years Goa has seen unprecedented economic growth. While the government attributes this to tourism boom, locals say a lot of the money is coming from the flourishing real estate and mining business, most of which is unplanned and illegal.

The tribals of Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary have gained little out of these developments. In fact, several of them have lost their livelihood since the Forest Act’96 came in force which restricted the tribals’ movement inside the forest area. Adding to this, now, is building of dozens of new temples through diversion of funds allocated to develop the villages.

The temples, built by a group of people who will soon be in the board of  temple trust and hence share the money donated by devotees – a big business these days- are being built inside Cotigao Wildlife  Sanctuary. “There were enough number of temples already in our area. These were small shrines, very simple in structure, but for ages we worshipped there. Now suddenly they are pulling down these old temples and building big structures,”  says Devidas.”

The current population of Cotigao is about 4 thousand. For such a large number of people there is only one healthcare center with just one male nurse and no doctors. There’s also no higher secondary schools.  The drinking water is supplied only for 1 hour a day. Says Devidas, “In past 5 years the village panchayat has spent 11 lakhs, which is 50% of it’s total budget, only on building new temples.  With that money we could have schools, better water supply system and better health care”, says Devidas.

But who are these builders? And where is the money coming from?

“They are from the local panchayat and the money that they spend are actually for village development. But temples are not going to develop our villages. Some of these temples which are complete, host fairs and other events. Makeshift shops come up during these events and money paid by them going to the temple trust. The trust also collects a lot of donations. The temples use loudspeakers. So we, the forest people have no development, but just noise and pollution.”

This year, on May 3, Video Volunteers launched India’s first Community News Service ‘IndiaUnheard’ and Devidas, a Community Correspondent of the news service has started bringing to our view, unheard stories of his communities such as this.  With that, there is finally hope of hearing real community voices and getting to see more of the real Goa.

Being in VV and working here often reminds me of Guyana, my home. With citizens from or with roots in many places, such as Africa, China, Europe and India, Guyana is a country of great diversity.

Growing up in such a diverse society had its dividends. To begin with, I knew about curry and roti (Indian bread) before I arrived; I have worn ghagras, salwars and saris (female Indian attire) back home, in Guyana, and also know some Kathak and Bharat Natyam dancing; I pray in Hindi and Sanskrit and I’ve read parts of and know about the Vedas, Ramayana and Bhagvad Gita.

So when I arrived in India, I didn’t feel like being in a foreign land as there was a lot I already knew. And yet there was so much more to learn and pick up for me, whether it’s Hindi or other intricacies of a daily life in India.

I have the same feeling while interning with VV.

One gets to see India through so many media – such as films and news. But the work of VV gives a complete picture to the world which is about the same India, yet previously unseen.

One of my tasks at Video Volunteers has been to edit information about videos that are uploaded to the YouTube and Channel19 websites. As a result, I sit and look at every video before I make any changes. Through this task I’ve seen videos covering so many issues – children needing playgrounds, a female rickshaw driver, street artists, the need to care for pets, water problems, educational problems, land rights and this list can go on. These videos show both positive and negative versions of the Indian society; as the masses see it and through them one discovers and learns a lot about the real India.

I might never get to meet the producers of these videos but for some reason, I feel like I know them. They come across as sincere, objective individuals who are willing to take that step to make a change instead of just talking about making a change.

At birth, I was named Taij/“Bright” due to being born in the Hindu religious period of Naav-raatri that preceeds Diwali – the Festival of Lights while Rani/“Queen” follows because my parents though it was a nice ending for Taij. Thus, the name Taijrani.

My name might mean “Bright Queen” when put together but I have seen brighter queens (and kings) associated with Video Volunteers. They are the people who utilize their time to create very moving content to share with the world about the problems they face through the use of videos. These queens and kings are hardworking individuals who are involved in research work and production of videos that address problems from health and water to lack of proper educational systems and discrimination. They are fearless in their tasks as they bring to the front problems affecting their societies; they are the voices of the marginalized, truly brilliant leaders!

- Séverine Lenglet

“We don’t write to delight or to blame people but to put the pen inside and reveal the lives of others”, said Albert Londres. This famous French writer left his foot print on the 20^th Century travelling the world while pioneering the field of investigative journalism. When I was 12, his name and exploits had me dreaming of being a journalist. Exotic lands, different peoples and foreign languages filled my mind. Working for Video Volunteers evoked these same feelings in me.

My dream is to utilize the media skills I have to support vulnerable people around the world and to accompany them in building better futures. At the beginning of March, I left Berlin, Germany, where I live and work as a journalist, to volunteer three months of my time with Video Volunteers’ (VV) IndiaUnheard program.  I just wanted to give from my time and my skills to this wonderful media development NGO. Five years ago, a Spanish filmmaker told me about VV and I always kept it in mind and I knew that one day, I would manage to go to India and take part in this great adventure.

Until now, it has been incredible. I took part in two-week training for the Community Correspondents (CCs) of Video Volunteers’ new program “IndiaUnheard”. We were in a small village, 30km from Ahmadabad, and met people from all over India: from rural areas and slums, be they Dalits, tribal, sexual or religious minority.

I can’t go into all their personal stories but let me try to describe some of them. One of the CCs is a transgender. He was born a female but knew he identified as a man. During his childhood, he was so abused at home that he tried to commit suicides many times. After leaving home and living on the streets, he met another person who identified as being transgender. Through this, he was finally able to realize he was not alone. I also met amazing women who championed women’s rights even after years of severe domestic violence. There was this particular Muslim woman who told us that this training was the first time in her entire life that she had not been forced to wear her hijab. I had the opportunity to work with all of them while creating scripts for their “profile videos” (for those who spoke English). Additionally, I filmed all the footage for the video profiles as well as videos during the training and when they were reporting. We, my boyfriend Javier (who has joined me in this great adventure and is creating the website for IndiaUnheard) and I, want to visit the CCs in their home communities in June when we will be travelling around the country for 20 days.

In Ahmadabad, I was also working with all the VV team members and we had a lot of fun. I love intercultural work and was quite moved during the training; I realized the chance that been given to be there, to meet these incredible people, the real India…With some of them, I have built steadfast friendships.

From all the footage of the training, I produced a promo film for the IndiaUnheard program which was published on the website a few days ago. We had a lot of discussions about the ways of doing this promo and everybody had different opinions and likes to debate about them. Thus, sometimes the work did not go as fast as I am used to when I work for mainstream media. But while editing, I learned more about using Final Cut Pro and doing some graphic effects. Here, I also learned about working for an NGO and with Indian colleagues. The VV team is also very helpful. When there is a stressful situation like the IndiaUnheard launch, they kept relax. Indian people are relaxed when under stress which is really different from most of the Western countries where I worked. In a stressful situation in the west, colleagues would start to become very unpleasant most of the times…

Throughout this experience so far, I am really enjoying myself and don’t feel like going back to work for mainstream media. In fact, I now want to continue to work for NGOs, foundations or institutions engaged in social change or in environmental issues and to create documentary films about their issues. Here I want to thank VV for all of this, for having given me the chance to realise my dream and more energy to continue in this way. Before coming to India, I read books about cultures and traditions in India. Most of the time, they just described the Indian culture as very traditional and patriarchal. I knew that the people from VV would be very open-minded and different from what was stated in the book. What I did not realise was that their passion for their work, their ideas and ways of seeing the world and just the way they are would be so innovative and would give so much hope for a better future and change for poor and marginalised people. Thanks also for this!

[Read more about Séverine Lenglet ]

Through a scholarship program, I, “TJ” Rampersaud, migrated for two years from the Land of Many Waters (Guyana, South America) to the City of Pearls (Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, Asia) – almost half way around the world. Now, I am at Video Volunteers’ office as an intern in Goa – “India’s Little Western Treasure”, as I like to refer to it. Goa is popularly known as the land of sand, sea and surf (very much like the Caribbean islands I know) but it also combines hills and forests, amazing flora and fauna and a diversity of cultures (which is a little like my Guyana).

Internship is a mandatory part of my masters program at the Department of Communication, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. With multiple possibilities for both paid and unpaid internships inside and outside of India at news agencies, public relations firms, production houses, etc., choosing somewhere to complete the 4 – 6 weeks out of class assessment was not very easy. All of the mentioned areas will help to strengthen what I have learned in the classroom over the past year. However, I am in Baga, Goa at the office of the non-governmental organization Video Volunteers, India – paradise…

How did I end up staying at a cottage, built into a hill, surrounded by trees, in Goa, as opposed to a prominent media house, or some other journalism related field in a major metropolitan? Two words: Developmental Communication. This is a new perspective on the communication discipline where communication and its related fields such as public relations, advertising and, definitely, journalism (newspaper, radio, television, internet) are used to foster development worldwide. This new field has definitely caught my interest as it is possible to combine many of my interests in one occupation: videos, photography, communications and, most importantly, development. For as long as I can recall, I have been a major supporter of giving opportunities to the marginalized, empowerment of the less fortunate and working towards the eradication of poverty.

Video Volunteers encompasses all of the above and so much more. The organization was built on the central premise of giving the voiceless a voice through video, a truly amazing concept. Video is a very powerful medium of communication.

So far, my internship has been good. I find myself in a relaxed atmosphere where communication is encouraged among all; it is peaceful yet vibrant. Just a few days into my internship and I feel like I have learned a lot already through the interaction with the Video Volunteers team here in Baga, regardless of where they are from: India, USA, Spain or France. As we say back home in Guyana, “yuh cyan wan guh ah crab dance and nah get mud…” – one cannot be in the presence of others and not get affected by their personalities. Therefore, I hope the rest of my days here take pattern from the previous few: work in a relaxed atmosphere where all are concerned with the betterment of society, inclusivity, communication and development.

Eid Mohammed is 81 and has lived his entire life in the Berhampura slum of Ahmedabad. A ‘dresswala’/tailor till a few years ago, Eid Mohammed always had something special: power of observation. He did learn to read the Quran in a madrasa, but never went to a formal school. Yet he always was, and still continues to be, popular in his locality as a man who knew a lot about the world. Of many interests in his life, films top the list.

It was at the screening of a film that I first met Eid. Samvad, the Community Video Unit had organized a get together of all their community members in Berhampora. I had accompanied Stalin, the founder of Video Volunteers, invited to speak on the occasion, which also had a special screening of several of Samvad’s films. As Stalin and other guests speakers finished addressing the audience, a frail old man walked on the stage. As everyone wondered what he would say, Eid Mohammed  took the mike and started – ;Cinema’ is, for me, Cine plus Maa (mother).  Just as a ‘Maa’ would never teach her child wrong things in life, Cinema also teaches nothing but the right thing. These cinemas that Samvad showed today also shows us truth.’

At this point, I knew I had to know more about this person. So post event I met Eid and asked what made him think of ‘Maa’ while describing cinema. ‘Because of these film makers of Samvad’, he said. My area – Narayandas –ki-chali, always had so many problems. We had no drainage, lanes were full of garbage and almost all the men were addicted to arrack or drugs. But I never knew these issues could also be the subject of a film until one day these young men and women of Samvad came and started shooting. When I asked who they made these films for, who would see them, who would do something about it, they said ‘you’. This reminded me of my mother especially when she would notice something bad that I did. She would say ‘Yes, beta, something bad has happened. But you are still special. And you can do so much better for yourself.

Eid was a regular at every screening. His eyesight was getting weaker, but his passion for films and change was the same. In fact his enthusiasm was fast spreading among other community members, earning him quite a few fans, I was told. What I didn’t tell him is that he had just earned another one – in me.

That Bhagwanpura village is just 100 km away from Ahmedabad – capital of the largest and supposedly the richest Indian state is hard to believe. For reason one, there is no running water, no toilets and no tar road. The only mode of transport for common people is Chakda – a strange combination of a cycle rickshaw and a push cart. There are so seats and no shed to save yourself from the blazing April sun, or pouring rain, if that ever comes.

Bhagwanpura has a population of about 10, 000, of which nearly half are landless. They are also Dalit or lower caste. April is the beginning of a tough time for these people. Because, this is when the village wells run completely dry. The fields, half baked in the sun, are not fit to be cultivated until the rain comes and with no work at the farms, the landless villagers have to face the eventuality: Leave their homes in search of work.

This year also several families are already on the move. Some are moving to Ahmedabad to work on the special road construction projects, while some will go to Surat, the city of textile factories. They will return after 3 months when the Summer is over and the farming is to restart. Apparently, there isn’t much to take except a few clothes and a few pieces of utensils. The doors will be locked, yes, but nobody fears looting or damage to their homes. No loss, save that of one academic year for their children.

The children follow their parents to wherever they go. This forces them out of school for 3-4 months. On return, either the school authorities decline to let them back in, or the students themselves refuse to go to school because they can’t grasp the lessons because of the long interval. Either way it’s an end of the road for them.

But this year will be different for people of Bhagwanpura, I am told. None of the children will have to drop out, they say. And why so? ‘Because now we have our migration cards’, they say. Explains Sejalben, a villager who will be leaving her village with 4 school-going children soon, ‘Apna Malak Ma people showed us a film where we learnt that government will provide special cards to migrant workers like us. If we showed these cards, the school in our new work place would admit our children in the same class. After seeing the film, we approached the sarpanch. The sarpanch formed a special committee and wrote our names to get us those cards, she said.

There was a smile on her face as she talked, and a sense of pride in her voice. I wonder if it was the pride of being able to protect her child’s future, or, empowering herself with information she never had before.