The good news is, there’s plenty of it
Is news by definition the antithesis of all things positive? Must the reading of newspapers make us depressed? There is very little one can do to control what is happening around us but an enterprising couple in Bengaluru decided that if they could not control events, they could at spread the positive stories that are around but which don’t make it to the news.
For the last two years, this couple Dhimant Parekh and Anuradha Kedia (who are not professional journalists) have been running a news portal called TheBetterIndia– which features stories that give hope. Both are engineers and MBAs. Their core team comprises Rahul Anand, another MBA and researcher, Gangadharan Menon, a wild life expert who wrote for the Times of India and the Hindustan Times before he joined them, Saurabh Pandey, the Hindi editor who runs a marketing agency, Shreya Pareek, whose hobby is travelling, talking and writing, and Ranjan Sivaswamy who is a consultant to IIM Bangalore.
“Let me clarify first that we are not trained journalists and so we did not have any high ambitions of changing society or making the world a better place. It’s just that about seven years ago looking at newspaper headlines every morning we started thinking seriously as to why news should always shake you up in horror? Leave you in disgust? Or should it also make you learn? Should it make you contribute? Should it enable you to bring about a change?” Parekh told the Hoot.
He was clear from the very beginning that by offering positive news, they didn’t want it to be preachy or opinionated. “We wanted to talk about ideas that have impacted communities, we wanted to showcase people who have brought about a change in their areas, we wanted to talk about forgotten art forms of India, celebrate the success of organizations who’ve improved the lives of children, and showcase the achievements of groups working to eliminate poverty and innovative movements like a photography club for the visually impaired," he said.
With that idea firmly in place, the next task was to ferret out such stories. In the beginning, the venture started as a filter blog on blogspot, linking to articles from various publications as and when they could locate them. But this was not easy because positive stories were not the priority then.
Then they turned reporters themselves and started scouring Bangalore on weekends to discover and know more about individuals and organizations who made good stories for them. “We covered these folks, captured photographs and put them up on our blog. We circulated the stories on Facebook and e-mail and pushed our content to as many people as we could - family, friends, colleagues,’ Parekh said.
This continued for six months till someone with a journalism background joined them. Later, more and more writers from across the country joined the news portal. The response was slow initially because they were getting only one story a week but as more writers joined, this went up to 8 to 10 stories per day.
Three years ago, Kedia quit her job to take up the venture full time and last year Parekh also took up the job of looking after the technical and marketing strategy. Funding is normally a huge problem in new set ups. The portal receives funding from Intellecap Impact Investments which backs projects that make a social impact. With funding, the right marketing strategy and compelling stories, they were able to reach four million hits per month within two years of its full time launch.
Their stories are inspiring. One is of a mentally challenged beggar in Gujarat who insisted on paying every time he was offered tea by a temple priest. The priest kept this money in a separate account for 20 years till it grew to 1.15 lakh. This money has been used to create a shelter for pigeons, mentioning the name of the donor prominently.
Another is of a 23 year old medical student not being allowed to sit for an exam as her injury was more that permitted by law. But the judge who heard her case declared that if she could come for a hearing every time she was summoned she was also fit enough to attend regular classes.
Some of the Better India team’s favourite stories are:
- Blind but loves photography: A group of visually impaired people running a photography club inspired a young girl, also visually impaired, to pursue photography too. “You’ve given me a new direction in life,” she said in her email to the team.
- Solar Lamps: In partnership with an NGO, they ran a story talking about how students in some remote villages in Orissa were unable to study after sunset due to lack of electricity. The story appealed to readers to donate solar lamps. They received the required number of solar lamps within a week.
- Jobs for the disabled: The portal posted this on their Facebook page and the readers referred people they knew who were specially-abled and eight of them got jobs in different companies.
- A 95 year old runs a child care centre: A story on a child-care centre run by a 95-year old in a village in West Bengal led to many readers visiting the place and contributing Rs. 5 lakhs.
- Increased Forest Cover : A feature story on this brilliant innovator who can create a forest anywhere (including in your backyard) led to him getting media enquiries from all over the world and a project request from Berlin.
The list is endless. Some of my personal favourites are:
The Bird Man of Kheechan
A Wedding with a Difference that Made a Difference
‘Ahmedabad No Rickshawalo’
Making 1.5 Million Meals Daily in less than 5 hours
Amitabh Srivastava has worked with the Hindustan Times group for 27 years, and with the Sahara Times. He is now a freelance journalist.