India speaks her mind

Rural women in Andhra Pradesh are proving that they are equal to the task by bringing out their own magazine and producing film documentaries.

In this globalised era, the media faces two great dangers. First, producers of media technology such as Sony Corporation are increasingly dictating media content. The second, more critical, factor is that with the globalisation of news content, voices and issues relevant to local communities are lost.

The chaos unleashed by ratings-obsessed TV coverage and print media circulation battles has resulted in mass media everywhere getting reduced to a "for the elite, by the elite, of the elite" news and issue coverage.

The worst fears of traditional and conservative journalists have been realised. It is the tabloidisation of the Indian media.

Ninety-five per cent of the population makes news only if they die in massive numbers due to killer hurricanes, tsunamis or wars. Otherwise, so-called important issues such as Hollywood celebrity divorces or the number of shoes possessed by women politicians that supposedly concern the peoples of the world are debated in mainstream media.

To be fair, there are still a few autonomous voices in the English and vernacular press in India, but even they are more concerned with the atrocities abroad than the ones committed on the poor Indian. While many grumble but accept this as news anyway, some decided to do something about it.

They are women, they are poor and they hail from villages in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. And they aim to make a difference as much in the manner in which their news is presented as in the news itself.

There are two groups. The first started Navodayam (New Dawn in Telugu) in August 2001, a monthly news magazine in Telugu and the only one of its kind in India completely owned and run by women. They are married women, rural, literate and poor, so much so that they cannot afford a pair of slippers. They are barefoot reporters who write, edit, do layouts, artworks, and write stories using DTP software on the computer, and publish the magazine.

They operate out of Chitoor district, a region known for its violent naxalite (separatist) groups. They are 60 in number, trained under Velugu (government-funded District Poverty Initiatives Project) on the basics of print journalism. But the focus is on the small group of ten determined women who actually run the magazine with contributions from the other women.

Editor Rathnamma says, "Mainstream media doesn't report on the problems we face partly due to accessibility. Also, the Telugu press doesn't write in our dialect, which makes it hard to understand." Their main subscribers are sanghams (village-level women's self-help groups). Since the target audience in the villages are mostly illiterate, school children read out the magazine at village meetings.

The topics cover a wide spectrum ranging from HIV/AIDS, sexual harassment, domestic violence and alcoholism to information about the latest schemes for villages, child labour, child marriage and civil rights.

The reportage, succinct and to the point, has created awareness and activism in the words of Bharathi, a Navodayam journalist. "We are reporting on issues and events as they happen. We are able to intervene against child marriages, resolve marital disputes, and publish the success stories. This spreads awareness among readers and more villagers are taking action." Fellow journalist Manjula agrees. "Earlier, when a drunken man beat up his wife, people wouldn't intervene. Now, sangham women are not afraid to intervene. We have become leaders in the village and my husband, a lorry driver, carries my picture to show it to his friends."

Bharathi adds, "We also record traditional songs and proverbs and publish them so the children can learn from the elders and learn the tradition and know our culture. Our work has earned us recognition and we are now allowed to sit along with men."

Those who know the gender demographic of India would realise that this is a major achievement for these women. It did not come easily.

Now celebrating their sixth anniversary, after receiving a state award for journalism in the fourth year of their activity, B. Kiran Kumari, the woman who trained them, narrates some of the difficulties the group faced. "They had problems from the liquor lobby, government loan defaulters and sometimes the government officials themselves. However, the women tackled them with courage and the integrity needed to deal with the consequences of conscientious reporting and critical writing."

She adds, "Mainstream dailies have a life of one day but Navodayam lives for the entire month and reaches interior areas where major dailies don't penetrate. Therefore, the issues are not forgotten but discussed in depth. These women also work as stringers for other dailies as most mainstream media do not send reporters to cover this region."

What started as an eight-page quarterly newsletter is today a 24-page monthly news magazine with a circulation of 20,000, and proving to be the prime news source for people in the region. With government funding ending, they have opted for local advertisements. Their success has inspired women's self-help groups in other districts and neighbouring states to start their own publications.

The second group is a rural media collective formed in October 2001 known as Community Media Trust located in Pastapur village in northern Andhra Pradesh. They are similar to the first rural women's media group in that they too are poor rural women from marginalised farming communities.

However these women are single mothers who are illiterate. But they weren't going to let illiteracy become a barrier and opted for video journalism. Seven women completed a 10-month course in video journalism, and have made over 100 documentary films, providing video clips for major television networks.

It all started a decade ago when, ravaged by years of drought and crop failure due to use of genetically modified seeds, their semi-arid land turned fallow and many farmers became landless labourers to pay off loan sharks while other families committed mass suicide, as they were unable to feed themselves due to the debt trap.

The mainstream media (both English and vernacular) ignored their plight for the most part and there was no debate on genetically modified seeds or pressure on the elected representatives or the conglomerates in question.

It was then that 5,000 women from 75 villages in Medak District, 100 kilometres from the state capital Hyderabad, organised themselves into sanghams and were taken under the wing of the Deccan Development Society (DDS), a two-decade-old non-governmental organisation that works with socially and economically disadvantaged rural communities in the area.

The women went back to time-tested traditional farming methods of bio-diverse, year round millet crops, a move that aimed at bringing food security to the villagers instead of using globalised farming methods and crops that catered to the needs of the international populace. The method worked. However, media coverage for this success story was scarce and the surrounding rural communities remained largely ignorant.

This is when they decided that they needed their own media. The aim was to voice the views, document local events, analyse issues, and facilitate a dialogue among themselves and the outside world.

Initially, their films and videos were about issues faced by villagers in their own districts, but emboldened by the successful reception of their films, they now make films on problems facing people in neighbouring districts and states as well.

Chinna Narsamma, the most outspoken of the lot says, "There is a big difference between the films others make and the films we produce." One has to only view their movie The Sangham Shot (Duration: 9 minutes, 30 seconds) to realise they have come up with not only innovative camera angles but vocabularies too. They don't use top or bottom camera angles.

They dislike what they call the 'patel shot', named after the feudal landlords or "patels" as they are known, who look down as from above. They don't like the "slave shot," which they've named after themselves as they were always made to sit below the landlords and men and hence had to look up from below. They always use the sangham shot, i.e. face-to-face with the subject.

"In the sanghams we are all equals," explains Mollema of Ippapally village, the group's camerawoman. "So we call an eye-level shot a sangham shot." The group has also trained women in Peru, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka under the aegis of Unesco (Learning without Frontiers).

They have four centres (offices), with two women per office and an editorial board. All the earnings from their years of films and video clips go into the Community Media Trust and they use the money for future projects.

Supported by Unesco's Women Speak to Women project, they also have an FM community radio station in Machnoor village with women trained in radio journalism and equipment running it. However, they are yet to get their licence due to government red tape but this hasn't stopped them. While they wait for the licence, they make programmes on gender, education, agriculture, health, weeding and seed availability, and distribute those using audiotapes that are to be played at the sanghams in various villages and village body meetings using loudspeakers.

These two rural media women's groups are slowly beginning to change the face of the news media, as they aren't just brilliant examples of successful rural journalism, but also case studies of how information can become a source of empowerment for thousands of poor, rural, marginalised women and their communities.

By finding their own voice, they show the way forward — relevant, sovereign media in a globalised world with disappearing national sovereignties where media content is largely controlled and repetitive. It's a new beginning.