A week-long Rural Storytelling Festival (November 10-16) organised by Youth Hub at Village Square brought together prominent journalists, development organisations and professionals, academia, placement representatives at various campuses and students to share, discuss and collaborate in highlighting dynamism and vibrancy of rural India and mainstream the development agenda.
Youth Hub launched ‘The Rural Media Fellowship Program ‘ on November 10, 2022. A cohort of 10 budding journalists recruited by from across the country began a 9-month fellowship to focus on rural stories. Vinay Kumar, Director Youth-Hub welcomed the fellows to the program and hoped that they will have a great time sharpen their skills and transition into the next level as journalists. He give an overview of Youth Hub, its vision and activities. Sandeep Ghosh, Director of DIU, gave an overview of his unit and how massive data on rural India is mined and insightful analytics and dashboards are developed and presented.
Lyndee Pickett, Editor of Village Square, provided a detailed orientation to the platform. Anirban Ghosh, Co-lead at Transform Rural India Foundation spoke to the fellows about the rationale of Village Square and exhorted them to make full use of the fellowship.
The five days orientation and training involved focussing on the techniques of effective storytelling using multiple media platforms. Experts in storytelling, video production, photography and social media held sessions with them combining theoretical and practical aspects. Lyndee Pickett, Amrit Vatsa, Founder, 3minutestories, and Sai Shah, Founder, Smallbrandbigbrand were the main resources.
Ruben Banerjee, a veteran journalist (former editor of Outlook and later a senior journalist with Al Jazeera) mentored the fellows and will continue to do so over this 9 month period.
Rajesh Mahapatra, Editor, Press Trust of India and the Founder of ‘Orissa Dialogues’ shared his journey as a journalist and provided tips on making rural stories effective for urban populations.
Our Development Intelligence Unit (DIU), a vertical of Village Square, reached a major milestone in developing and finalizing rural quality of life index (RQLI) in collaboration with the Ministry of Rural Development.
RQLI is built on a premise that there is more to quality of life than income alone, and a multi-indicator measure offers a more holistic view toward understanding communities and the state of their well-being. RQLI is ready to go live and will be part of the Ministry’s MIS.
Village Square, a unique digital platform to share stories and insights on rural India, announced the winners of the nation-wide photo competition on the theme ‘Downtime Rural India’ ( how rural India relaxes) at the Palm Court Art Gallery at the India Habitat Centre. The competition attracted a large number of entries from journalists, photographers and development practitioners.
The winners were decided by a jury of experts and on popular vote. Lyndee Pickett, Editor of Village Square said that the entries were so amazing that it was difficult for the jury to choose the winners.
These stunning photos were on display at the Art Gallery at the IHC from November 14-16 and then will be at the Sunder Nursery for a month. You are most welcome to visit and see rural life in all its richness, vibrancy and dynamism.
A thought provoking session on ‘Development Unplugged’ in partnership with Indian School of Development Management, was organized on November 15. Prominent development professionals interacted with campus placement representatives, social entrepreneurs and students from Delhi University.
They explored the development sector in all its diversity and magnitude covering domains such as climate change, environment, rural development, health and nutrition, technology, agriculture, livelihoods and community collectives; they talked about the large variety of organizations that worked in the sector from community based to national and international organizations that offered diverse roles in artificial Intelligence, data science, engineering, medicine, program management, marketing, business development, strategy development, human centred design, talent management, behaviour change etc – there was, in fact, no CV that was not relevant to this sector.
We also had an interesting discussion on the commonly held view that compensations were not very attractive in the sector and that was the reason why bright young students shied away from joining the sector. Deepti Dwivedi, a faculty at the ISDM shared their institute has benchmarked roles to salaries and was pushing organizations to pay comparable salaries to make the sector more professional. Participants, in general, agreed that it was a sort of myth and a stereotype: the sector offered competitive salaries based on skill sets and the type of organizations folks worked for. One needs to look at the sector in its entirety.
Aditya Sethi, was the main speaker who talked about his journey from investment banking in North America and Japan to social technology leader and an entrepreneur, and how inspiring it has been for him. We also had a panel discussion by 4 inspiring change makers seeking to solve different problems and how their journey had been. The Q&A session was lively and the participants asked a number of questions that pertained to career choices in the sector.
Prominent civil society and development organizations came together to discuss how the community of development professionals can collaborate to tell the stories of what we do in an interesting, effective and engaging way to gain more traction among the policy makers, development professionals and the youth. They felt our stories should have the ability to teach a new idea, make connections between the audiences and more importantly should have the power to drive change. Stories grab and maintain attention; they help us to understand and remember messages, they touch our emotions and create empathy, empathy is needed to engage the target audience. This was final episode of the rural storytelling festival.
Village Square presented its three verticals – the Content, the DIU and the Youth Hub – how each tell rural stories using different formats. Lyndee shared how Village Square is driven to find insightful stories coming out of rural India, too often ignored by mainstream media.
Everyone has a compelling story – it is just a matter of helping them share it. VS had revitalized its format and is now devoting a separate sections to stories of different kind, For example, Rural news was about the latest rural news, most touching stories and insights from villages. Village Vibes celebrates the art, culture and festivals of India’s village life. Field Journal was about opinion pieces from at the sharp end of the development world. She called upon the CSO partners to collaborate with Village Square.
Sandeep Ghosh shared the DIU platform as a clearinghouse of rural information presented in a user-friendly format, addressing the needs of diverse stakeholders in public, private, and civil society. He said it brought rural India into focus and furthers the field of rural analytics for understanding, positioning, and informing stakeholders and decision-makers. The development of rural quality of life index is a major milestone and it will revolutionize how well-being of rural communities will be evaluated and policies targeted. As this was going to be part of the Ministry of Rural Development, this is a pan-India effort. DIU has also done innovative evidence-based research on what the rural communities eat and how they relax.
Vinay Kumar presented the vision of Youth Hub and how all its initiatives are aimed to sensitize urban educated youth to the issues, challenges and opportunities in rural India. It believes youth are at the fore-front and the leaders of tomorrow, and their attitude to rural India would make a huge difference in developing a strong, progressive and inclusive India. Youth Hub reaches out to the youth in college campuses and youth clubs and societies to anchor events through campus ambassadors. It offers internships to college students to give them a flavour of rural India and the development sector. It partners with civil society organizations to co-host students for rural immersion. Also, it instils leadership qualities in aspiring leaders through its ‘Shadow the Leader’ program and builds capacity in students and civil society staff in effective rural storytelling. He invited all the civil society organizations to join hands in building leaders of tomorrow. Youth Hub also organises Bharat Youth Dialogues once a quarter with a view to bridge the rural urban divide and engage urban youth with development issues.
Anubha Bhonsle, Founder of Newsworthy and former executive editor at CNN/IBN, passionately talked about her experiences working in the rural India and expressed her disappointment with rural reportage done by those who hardly visit the rural India. She felt that communication by development organizations, often, was done in a manner that was done in an alien dialect, not fully understood by the intended rural community. There was a need to use local culture, dialect, cultural nuances and social practices to communicate effectively so that community able grasp what was being communicated. Often, simple messages were made complex and attempt is made include several messages in one message confusing the community. ‘If you want a malnourished woman to take iron tablet, why can’t you just tell her that and what it is for’. Often, there is one agency for communication, another for delivery and third for looking at impact and all might not be on the same page.
Anubha was of the firm opinion that there was a lot of dynamism and vibrancy in the rural areas and a lot of change was happening, but if we want to expedite it, we must innovate our methods so that we do not make life so complex for the community. It seems that for most organizations, the client was not the community but the donor, government or somebody else. That is why the questionnaires developed by experts are so long and probably not useful and effective but they are used as the committee approving it wants it that way. This has to change if we want to accelerate change in rural India. Anubha’s talk led to a lively discussion with participants agreeing with her on the need to be more sensitive to the local environment and that approach of some organizations were either too technical or complex.
We will be sharing the full video of the session in a day or two for those of who want to watch. Please stay tuned to Village Square Youth Hub handles at YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn. For the moment, you may want to watch a few snippets at https://www.instagram.com/reel/ClEESjnjY58/?igshid=YWJhMjlhZTc=
The session was attended by representatives and communications leads from Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Digital Green, Triangle Research Institute (TRI), Project Concern International (PCI) , Sambodhi, Learning4impact, Reach India, Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), IPE Global, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Future Works, Tech4Dev, GoodHaat, Ipas Development Foundation, Foundation for People-centric-Health Systems(FPHS).
