Development Journalism in India

Development Journalism started in India with the beginning of this new arena of the mass communication. Wilbur Schramm was also involved in India during the initial days of development communication. Schramme's international activities in the 1950s and 1960s took him to India too. In 1964, he headed a team of experts who were invited by the Indian government to advice on developing the infrastructure for mass media communication in India. The Indian Institute of Mass Communications was established in Delhi in 1965 with his recommendation. The Institute has been imparting knowledge and skills on development journalism to the participants from across the third world.

Television began in India as a UNESCO supported educational project in 1959, and grew very slowly in the 1960s.

There is a long tradition of Development Journalism in India. P. Sainath compailed a book" Everybody loves a good drought" in 1996 based on a series of reports he filed for the Times of India from some of the country's poorest districts. The book, compilation of ten development stories won thirteen awards.

The Press Institute of India, an NGO working for media has been publishing GRASSROOTS, a rural newspaper.

Sensitizing the Media for Development Issues:

‘Development Journalism’ focuses on the needs of the poor, the deprived, and the marginalized and emphasizes their effective participation in developmental planning. Or to say it slightly elaborately, this kind of journalism motivates the active participation of the affected people and advocating for their interests, in place of the views of the policy makers and the planners i.e. the government.

For last 10 years Charkha has been functioning with this concept of journalism as its model. It has to extent succeeded in generating an interest among a section of media persons towards people’s issues. But on the whole, the scene still persists where the mainstream media is not sufficiently focusing grassroots people’s initiatives and movements. It is for this reason; activists of mass movements and organizations have initiated efforts for making an interface possible between mass media and such organizations. One illustrious example and fruit of such interface is the Narmada Bachao Andolan. This movement has assumed a nation wide interest not for the reason that it symbolizes people’s fight against mega dams, but because it could and is still using mass media in a better and effective way for highlighting itself in the public eye.

There was a time when media would reach to movements for reporting it. But unfortunately now, activists have to do two things simultaneously- carry on with their movements and write news reports about them and also take those reports to newspaper offices for favor of publication. The sorcerers of the mainstream media don’t make any efforts on their own to lend their ears to the stirrings and upsurges at the grassroots level. Consequently, in situations where activists are yet to learn to find a place for their issues, failures and successes in the mainstream media, these remain confined only to their immediate local surroundings and don’t reach to a wider audience or readership. Charkha is a modest initiative in making an interface possible between action at the grassroots level and the mainstream media; an effort for ‘spinning action into words’.

Charakha claims that it try to making bridges between people’s issues and the media. If they are left with no time to reach down to the issues; we can take these to them. To put it more clearly, we want media’s centralized power to be decentralized.

Charkha is precisely working for this kind of decentralization of media and is trying to do it at various levels. Charkha starts from the Panchayat level. In Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, U.P., Jharkhand, Uttranchal and Bihar, we conduct Writing Workshops at the tehsil and state levels in which social activists related to Panchayat Raj & Self- governance are given information about media. For evolving panchayat level media we train these activists in preparing wall newspapers and also in writing reports etc. for newspapers panchayat related issues. Local editors and journalists are also invited to these workshops so that they could familiarize themselves with the ground realities of a village and in future are willing to include these issues in their papers. Charkha also conducts Media Workshops for journalists and free lancers in which the roles of media and people’s issues are the focal point of discussion. Social activists are given information about the internal constitution of the media, its way of functioning, pressures on it and its responsibilities; while media persons get an opportunity for developing a deeper understanding of people’s issues. In the light of the experiences Charakha have gained in last ten years reveal that though successes on this path are very difficult to achieve, but not impossible.

Localized Approaches to Development Communication

The relationship between communication and development can be broadly categorized in two types:

a) Macro societal level

b) Micro level

Macro societal level studies examine the co-relation between existence or availability of mass media institutions and various indices of development. Lerner, Schramm and other communication theorists found high correlation between media participation and such indices of development as organization, literacy and political participation.

A UNESCO study (UNESCO, Mass Media in Developing Countries, Reports and Papers in Mass Communication, 1961, Paris) found that indicators of national development such as per capita income, literacy, urbanization and industrialization were correlated with indicators of a well-developed media infrastructure (e.g. newspaper consumption per person, daily newspaper circulation per 100 persons, cinema seats per 100 persons and number of radio sets per 100 persons.) The development of mass media was clearly related to other developments in the country.

All the studies provide direct support to the view that a modern mass media system is an important part of social overhead capital of development.

Mircolevel studies examine the co-relation between media exposer and modernization variables. Communication scholars have found significant interrelationship between communication variables and modernization variables. It is argued that information of certain kind awakens appetite for new things and new ways of doing things and mass communication produces demonstration effect.

Other scholars have expressed that mere availability of any kind of mass media is not likely to be useful for innovative changes; the information transmitted through media must be functionally and locally relevant and relates to patterns of content presented to the audience. Information is perceived as useful, it is applicable, timely and specific in given situation.

The importance of localized communication approach is emphasized. Grass roots-based, people-centered participatory development strategies that emerged in the 1970s proposed a completely different notion of cultural change distinct from the West to East diffusion of modern ideas via the mass media suggested by well-intentioned US academics. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire outlined a new methodology that had illiterate adults participating actively in the transformation of their world.

In Freire's proposed pedagogy of the oppressed, the teacher (or media producer) is no longer the authority, but a learner-cum-teacher: someone who both learns and teaches in dialogue with other fellow learners-teachers. The dialog-based message design process proposed in this book tries to approximate the Freirean ideal.

The development programmes must be local to meet the local needs which vary widely in differing regions and sub-regions in large developing countries as there is plurality of cultures and languages.

Communication scholars argue that a localized approach would enable the communicator to design messages which will be relevant in terms of utility, timeliness, applicability, specificity, etc.The localized media approach would tailor message for local conditions. Such an approach can overcome the constraints of infra-structural reasons and facilitate two-way communication by allowing greater involvement and participation of the audience in the communication process.