Abstract
The current media model is failing to deliver the full promise of democracy. As it focuses on the pre-occupations of urban society, rural India is excluded and marginalised. This has adverse effects particularly on Adivasi communities who speak the Gondi language in the forests of central and eastern India. Facing isolation from the state, and rarely addressed by mainstream media, they have little agency in a long-running conflict driven by Maoists. This chapter looks at an experiment in participatory citizen journalism in the forest area by CGnet Swara, employing the innovative use of mobile phones to develop a different media model.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2011, a series of 42 in-depth interviews and site visits were conducted to understand emergent behaviours and experiences on CGnetSwara (Mudliar et al., 2013). Researchers documented the evolution of the system from a general story-telling platform to a hub for grievance redressal and solution journalism. In 2014, follow-up research conducted 70 interviews along with field immersion to understand the impact of CGnetSwara in the eyes of its users (Marathe et al., 2015). In addition to the resolution of grievances, the research documented several other dimensions of benefit: contributors described the impact of being heard, having an audience for artistic expression, and promoting personal, while listeners described the impact of discovering previously unvoiced issues, building awareness of local news, and inspiring confidence and agency that positive changes are within reach. Researchers have also undertaken a critical comparison of CGnetSwara and a state-run helpline, finding that while simple grievances are often resolvable by a helpline, the open and participatory nature of CGnet is important for making progress on longstanding community issues (Marathe et al., 2016). Additional research on CGnetSwara has examined numerous aspects spanning the meaning of participation to its relation to other forms of journalism and citizen journalism (Chadha & Steiner, 2015; Inamdar, 2018; Mudliar & Donner, 2015; Pain, 2017).
- 2.
More details on this impact can be seen on the project website, http://cgnetswara.org/.
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Choudhary, S. (2024). Mobile Media Democratising Journalism in India: A Case Study of Chhattisgarh. In: Dahiya, S., Trehan, K. (eds) Handbook of Digital Journalism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6675-2_38
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