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By Hemangini Gupta There's a community video revolution happening in rural India, and it’s no longer tokenism. Video newsmagazines are made, distributed and screened regularly and professionally. They’re even streaming online at a website called Channel 19
At an adivasi village in Andhra Pradesh, three hours from the nearest railhead, 22-year-old Samata Jadhav, sprawled on a mattress, is holding forth on a media counter-revolution. Her hands move expressively and examples of media inconsistencies roll off her tongue like she had been preparing for this interview for years. “Current media cater to their market,” she says. “They each have their agenda. But the media should exist to give information to people; to give people a chance to speak, and to hear their voice. Now, even though we have so much media, what is the use?” She sits up and warms to her theme. “After the December 31, 2007 incident in Mumbai (where two women were sexually assaulted by a mob as they left an upmarket hotel), for three days the media went crazy with the issue, but after that? Important news is given such small space. Viewers will leave their housework to watch the Saans serials, but where is the space for basti – community – news?” She pauses before her clincher – a description of the community video unit at which she is a producer - “We show that basti log exist, and take vox pops from them on their issues, thus influencing change.” Samata is a video producer of Apna TV or Our TV, the community video unit, or CVU, set up by Mumbai-based NGO Akshara, and Video Volunteers, founded by Jessica Mayberry in 2006 to help NGOs set up CVUs. Mayberry came to India in 2002-03 as a Fellow of the American India Foundation and gave video training to communities in a programme run by the Ahmedabad-based NGO, SEWA (Self Employed Women's Association). Young video-makers in the US are starved of interesting opportunities, she says, and foresaw a model where volunteer filmmakers would train local communities and NGOs, and conduct low-cost workshops, quickly building many media units within existing NGOs. But then, she soon realised that “if the CVU is not just tokenism, we have to invest in serious, full-time capacity-building. The real investment is in the whole system – this is like giving people who think at a class seven level a Master’s degree.” SEWA pointed Jessica towards the work of well-known filmmaker Stalin K, who co-founded Drishti as a media arts and human rights organisation working to empower local communities. Impressed by Drishti's work and ethos, Jessica launched Video Volunteers (VV) to collaborate with Drishti, implementing a model of community video that was tested and modified through work with 16 different NGOs (in seven countries) before they came up with their current design. The model that VV and Drishti currently work with was one of the winners of the NYU Stern's Business Plan Competition in 2007. Participating NGOs pool in half the funds required to set up a CVU, while the other half of the funding comes from the VV and Drishti team -- a total cost amounting to approximately Rs 36 lakh. This money covers the initial 18 months during which a filmmaker trains the local CVU team of up to ten producers who are sourced from the community and includes many women. A board consisting of members of the NGO, Drishti-VV staff and the local community decides what issues the CVU will film based on feedback and requests from the community. This year kicked off with an award of $275,000 – a Knight News Challenge award -- for Video Volunteers to expand its programme across India, and the hunt for partner NGOs is on. Newsmagazines and an online channel The final product made by the community video producers is a newsmagazine – a new one every six weeks -- that is screened in over 50 locations, across 25 villages that are close to each other. These nightly screenings are followed by a discussion on the issues thrown up by the magazine. Each newsmagazine has several segments: a case study from the community showing someone benefiting from using government resources, for instance; a tips segment; vox pops from the community; an inspiration story; a campaign segment and finally a call to action. The magazines are distributed locally through DVDs to self-help groups and to small cable operators. Now, through the launch of Channel 19 (named after Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, guaranteeing free speech), the videos will be introduced into mainstream media and at larger international fora. A leading English-language news channel in India is expected to begin airing VV videos in their Citizen Journalist slots and on a special half-hour show. “With Channel 19, we want to introduce a collective identity. This is not a Drishti or a VV project, it is a project of all of these CVUs,” says Jessica. Channel 19 is online at http://ch19.org where it describes itself as “the first online channel dedicated exclusively to community-produced media”. Drawing from its work with several communities, Channel 19 is a social media network that is solutions-based, rather than problems-based. The CVUs, and now Channel 19, are a “sort of CNN or BBC for the grassroots” and remain focused on local television production and problem-solving rather than documentary video-making. Ambitious plans are in the pipeline to introduce CVU work onto video festival schedules and to present them to workers in the development sector, as well as to other CVUs internationally. CVU videos are already streamed online at www.videovolunteers.org. Mayberry estimates that the videos have been watched by 145,000 people in the last 18 months. She emphasises that this is “not NGO media”. The participating NGO does not commission newsmagazines based solely on the issues it works on: instead the topics are selected by the producers based on their research into what the community needs information about. By helping set up a media unit in their community, the NGO expands its local reach (and international reach, as the videos are put online or introduced into other media). The media project also helps the community to think about problem-solving and encourages them to mobilise around a certain issue. With time and some experience, communities can gain enough information and inspiration from the newsmagazines to act on local issues independent of the NGOs’ support. In fact, the partnership between the NGO Laya and Drishti-VV in rural Andhra Pradesh is headed in this direction. The CVU called Manyam Praja Video, or Forest People's Video, is soon going to function independently as a video production unit that is aiming to generate its own income by developing films and videos for other NGOs along with routine community screenings. Issues and impact CVU producers each have their own favourite magazines; ones which they believe made the most impact. For Samata Jadhav, who began work with Akshara as a volunteer while still at college, her pick is the recent magazine she helped make on sexual harassment. She and a colleague, Yashodhra Salve, describe the research that went into the planning of the video: the campus visits, discussions with male and female students and finally the background reading that took place before the video was ready to be shot. The video itself discusses issues of masculinity and the myths that are built around the phenomenon of what is so trivially termed “eveteasing”. “Boys think they are complimenting girls and that girls like to be commented upon,” Samata says. “Girls do not react because they are afraid they will get a bad name, or will be told that they 'asked for it' and will be questioned about where they went. People will say 'chaalu ladki ke saath hi chedh chaadh hoti hain' (only streetsmart girls are teased).” She deftly summarises patriarchal attitudes, societal norms which place women in a position of vulnerability and women's subsequent guilt after harassment. “Boys think that girls don't understand a sense of fun; that they mistake it for harassment,” she concludes. “Our team had to bust the myth that women dress for others, and we had to differentiate between comments versus compliments.” Samata's feminist readings of the phenomenon of street harassment lead naturally back to the thrust of the participating NGO in her CVU – the feminist organisation Akshara, associated strongly with campaigns that centre around issues of violence against women. Other producers too have used subjects closely related to the main focus of their facilitating NGOs. Manjibhai Jadav, a co-ordinator from Apnaa Malak Maa, the all-dalit CVU working with NGO Navsarjan in Gujarat's caste-conscious Surendernagar district, describes positive changes that are linked to the thrust of the work that Navsarjan does. Although the CVU does not tackle only dalit issues, its most visible gains have been in beginning to overcome the massive caste hierarchies that have been in place for generations. Recently, an upper caste man visited Manjibhai's house and drank tea with him, an act that would have been unthinkable earlier. “Non-dalits also ask for videos on their issues,” says Manjibhai. “We can now eat together and talk.” The coming together of OBCs (Other Backward Castes) and dalits has meant stronger emphases being laid on dalit activism and now, Manjibhai says, “we will bring people together with a video around the issue of water, which is not a dalit issue”. Transforming individual lives Aside from their impact on the wider community, the CVUs also impact individuals in life-changing ways. Yashodhra Salve, from the Akshara CVU has now been elected a Youth Fellow by the Delhi-based NGO Pravah which aims to build leadership amongst youth for social change. Her proposal outlined her interest in encouraging sport amongst underprivileged young women; a little after the Drishti-VV advanced training workshop she was off to Bangalore for a training session where she would interact with the other Fellows. Nineteen-year-old Neeru, a producer with the Navsarjan CVU laughs that she is the only boy in a family of 11 sisters. In her family girls have never gone out to work and before her work with the CVU began, she had never left her village. Recently her video-making has garnered her respect in her basti, she says, and her new status has given her the confidence to question the local sarpanch on why he wasn't showing up regularly for work. For other producers, the CVU even acts as a supportive group of individuals in the absence of family. Twenty-one-year-old Vishvamma was an agricultural worker before she got recruited on to the Laya CVU in Adateegala, an adivasi area in Andhra Pradesh's East Godavari district. Educated up to the fifth standard she was initially sceptical about whether she would be able to work with new technologies, and as a reporter and producer. Living alone with her grandmother, she is now pleased that her family has begun to appreciate her work. “I am alone, so I have to struggle,” she explains bluntly. “I want to be like other girls. Now I am happy because I can share my feelings with the team and whenever I have a problem there are people to help me.” The draw of the videos has differed, depending on the region. With 12 CVUs now functioning in different parts of India, each unit makes videos in its own specific idiom. Four are videoshalas, focused on education and others focus on education, citizenship, democracy and diversity. Samata explains that screening a video in a Mumbai slum is a challenging experience because people are near-saturated with the media marketplace that is thriving around them in India's film city. “People didn't have so much enthusiasm to come earlier,” she says, “but now they come running to see themselves and their neighbours” -- suggesting that the power of community video will always lie in its rooting itself in the immediately familiar. While it might be a tough task to get Mumbai's busy residents to stay on for a discussion following the screening, in the adivasi village of Adateegala, where the pace of life is much slower, audiences often request another video to be shown since they have come all the way to watch it. Discussions are longer since people have more time to share thoughts and other entertainment is relatively limited. The ability of a video to tell a story compellingly and be replayed many times makes it a valuable information-dissemination tool. The trend of undercover shoots and exposes in mainstream media has made its way into CVU filming too. The public screening of videos on issues of corruption or government indifference makes State officials more aware that they are being watched, thus rendering them accountable to the people they serve. Citizens also gain confidence from public screenings, understanding that the cumulative force of many protests can finally effect change. NGOs in turn benefit from communities that take agency themselves and drive change. Essentially the VV-Drishti initiative builds on the fact that technology is cheaper now than it ever was before, and video equipment prices are constantly spiralling downward. With lower costs and easy-to-use technologies, local communities can begin to create and control flows of information. The CVU allows disadvantaged groups to have access to information that is of relevance to them. Through introducing its high-quality films into mainstream media, the CVU is also hoping to alter a media landscape that currently ignores large chunks of the population. Perhaps they will soon even be financially self-sufficient, making videos on demand. Agent of change One way to estimate the CVU’s success is through the specifics. A video that explained the time-frame within which blood samples need to be analysed in order for malaria to show up, helped confused villagers understand why none of them had been properly diagnosed when they were so clearly ill – their samples had not reached the hospital in time. Another explained the concept behind the Below Poverty Line measurements, thus encouraging villagers to know what rations they were entitled to. A third video exposed the corruption that resulted in the digging of a well to a depth shorter than it should have been; after the video, the digging intensified and villagers had access to cleaner water. Success that is harder to quantify than these changes is visible in the producers' confidence and in their enthusiasm for their filmmaking. Taking on sluggish government officials or corrupt ones appears to have become a somewhat enjoyable high. Sharada from the all-dalit Navsarjan team explains the furore caused after her CVU screened a video on sanitation. “The thakur threatened us and said that if you do this again, I will break your screen,” she remembers with glee. “Do you know what our response was? We took the police to that village and stopped the illegal manufacture of alcohol there!” Youthful defiance mingles with the newfound power to share information and effect real change with these CVU producers. Elsewhere in the world, mainstream media might maintain a blinkered focus on its advertiser's niche target audiences but in India, with these CVUs, the revolution may just be televised. Hopefully, on primetime news, for the world to see. (Hemangini Gupta is a freelance journalist who has previously worked with The Hindu and CNN-IBN. She is interested in gender and how new technologies can be used for development.
) InfoChange News & Features, September 2008
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