Village stories find a platform
Gaon Connection, a newspaper about farming and other rural concerns, has struck a chord in Uttar Pradesh.
ANUBHA YADAV finds that there are ambitious plans to expand its reach.
"I was visiting an acquaintance when I found a copy of this recently launched newspaper called Gaon Connection. I took an instant liking to it because even though the newspaper is new, the team has been delivering good journalism. Is akhbaar main kheti badi se sambandhit achhi jaankari hoti hai. Yeh paper kisanon ke liye bahut achha hai. (The newspaper carries good stories on farming. It makes a very good read for farmers.) - Harilal (retired government officer, farmer), Ildara.
Gaon Connection, popularly projected as rural India's mouthpiece, is only about four months old. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Akhilesh Yadav, while unveiling it, praised the initiative and also expressed the need for urbanites to connect with rural India. The brain behind it all is the veteran journalist as well as lyricist and scriptwriter Neelesh Misra whose disenchantment with mainstream media's portrayal of rural India proved to be the fountainhead of Gaon Connection.
The official websites of the newspaper says the paper aims to bring out news related to 'agriculture, health, social issues, nutrition, education and rural innovation from India's villages'. It aspires to change the way rural India is covered - it has been striving to portray the transformation that is underway in rural India. The real question is: how successful has it been in doing so?
"It was about two months back that I started subscribing to Gaon Connection. There is not a particular section or writer that I can say is my favourite but I like the paper as a whole. It carries news that is important to us, the rural people of India. All relevant areas such as development, education, health etc. are covered. "Yeh paper dheere dheere apni pakad bana raha hai," (The paper is slowly strengthening its foothold in rural areas; more and more readers are subscribing to it) says Ram Prakash, a farmer in Babaganj.
As of now, Gaon Connection has no corporate financial backing. However, a news website had earlier reported that the paper will receive support from Bhartiya Gramin Vidyalaya, a society run by Misra's mother, Mrs. Nirmala Misra. The paper plans to move funds through both crowd-funding as well as by selling advertisement space. Misra is also employing unconventional methods to raise funds - he recently lent his voice for a commercial to raise money for the paper. At the same time he says, no space will be allowed for advertorials.
The 12-page Hindi newsweekly is priced at rupees five and all profits made are put back into running the paper.
As of now, Gaon Connection is only circulated in Uttar Pradesh. For 830 million people who inhabit the villages of India, a newspaper dedicated to issues at the core of their existence would undoubtedly be of value. And this view is apparent in their assessment of the paper.
"Desh ke bade akhbaar aur channel bade logon, bade industries ke bare main news karte hain. Hum kisaan log hain, humain in bade logon se kya fayda. Hamari choti samasyen par yeh dhyaan nahin dete" (The electronic and print media are busy covering big issues, big names, big industries. Our small problems do not fit in their pattern of everything that is big.) Gaon Connection is a good change. I have been reading it since the very start and surprisingly, they cover news that is important to us. We are farmers - we want to know more about farming, we want to know more about life in villages, we want to know about innovations that are helpful to us. Gaon Connection provides us with all of that and this is why the paper is making its presence felt in rural Uttar Pradesh," adds Sanjay Verma a poet and farmer from Barabanki.
Other than presenting the villages in a new light, the team is also working towards creating white-collar jobs for rural youth and dealing with the larger issue of unemployment by employing rural people as reporters and distributors.
The newspaper is divided into interesting sections such as 'Badalta India', 'Baat Pate Ki', 'Nari Diary' etc., and also features opinion articles from such leading figures of Indian journalism as Mayank Chhaya, Ravish Tripathi and Richa Anirudh.
A major section of the paper is devoted to news related to farmers and farming, but it has also carried stories on other vocations as beekeeping and fish farming. The team also lays emphasis on covering news related to rural innovations, rural achievements, healthcare and entertainment. The last page of this 12-page broadsheet is dedicated to photofeatures. Gaon Connection has also done innumerable stories about rural women.
"Gaon Connection has done many news stories related to rural women. Last week, they did a story about villages where accepting dowry is prohibited. A few weeks before this, they had done another story about a group of village women who want to take up photography as a profession. It is good to have a paper dedicate some space solely to women," feels Neetu Singh, a housewife in Etah.
The paper has come a long way since its inception and is now circulated in 1,200 villages in 30 districts of Uttar Pradesh. In Akbarpur in Kanpur, where no other newspaper reaches, Gaon Connection is widely read - this because the team has been putting in arduous effort to reach places either cut off or neglected. It has done so by forming a network that involves the local people by entrusting them with the task of distribution. The paper also has an active website where the readers from all places can read the paper for free.
Gaon Connection is run by a small team of a few voluntary journalists but the caravan of supporters has grown in the last few months. Rakesh Rawat who started as a reader, was so impressed by the newspaper that he took up the responsibility of its distribution. He started with distributing 10 copies per week but owing to the popularity of the newspaper, the number has now gone up to 250.
"Most newspapers cover villages with a prejudiced outlook. Any progress visible in rural India goes unnoticed, most accidents - even the big ones - are rarely reported. Instead, what we see is an amalgamation of potboiler news. The team at Gaon Connection has been working hard to present rural India in a new light. Their journalists travel to the interiors to cover news which is a welcome change," says Rakesh Rawat in Barabanki.
Gaon Connection's reach has now extended to include districts like Firozabad, Etah, Etawah, Kanpur, Saharanpur, Ghazipur, Ghaziabad, Gorakhpur and many others. The road may appear to be without bumps but it is certainly a long one. The paper, though it enjoys immense popularity in many villages of UP, remains fairly unrecognised in many others. For instance, in the small village of Ratibhanpur near Etah, none of the townspersons had heard of the paper. Similarly, in Kiloni in Mathura, Gaon Connection is relatively unknown. In Morna in Muzaffarnagar, only a limited number of people had heard about it.
Neelesh Misra is ambitious about his project - he not only plans to launch Gaon Connection in many other languages, in many other states; the idea of launching a rural newswire service is also on his mind. The concept of a rural newspaper is irrefutably a good one but he will have to wait some more before he can launch Gaon Connection at a nationwide level because though the paper has been appreciated and generally received well, it is not yet a household name in Uttar Pradesh.
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