A first of its kind experiment in the world and a successful one at that. Meet Shubhranshu Choudhary, the man behind CGNET Swara.
It’s been almost one and a half years since the launch of CGNet Swara, how has the journey been?
It has been very exciting because what we did not understand before-when I say ‘we’ and ‘I’, I mean as a journalist in India or the world- is that majority of the people are oral in nature. They are more comfortable speaking and listening rather than reading and writing and it is the whole process of democratization of media. So when you make a platform which is based on voice, based on oral traditions, then people are more comfortable in taking part in it. What we have been seeing is very good participation from people, even when I say people; they are mostly lesser educated people from remote areas. They are reporting, talking about their lives, the world around them. When I use the word ‘reporting’, it means trained reporting abilities but none of our reporters are trained. So it’s a benchmark. So, people have this weapon, if I can use this word, of mobile phone and they have things which they want to talk about, now they have this platform where they have been speaking, using this tool in their language and voice. So far, it has been a very enriching experience for all of us.
On paper, the idea looks a little improbable because disenfranchised people calling up a number in Bangalore, with their myriad problems, yet we see so many of their grievances are actually being addressed because of this platform. So, how did you start receiving the attention of the mainstream media?
See, when you say that the number is in Bangalore, the number need not remain there because what we are doing is an experiment and when you find that an experiment is successful and delivering, then you can take that number nearer to people which we hope to do now. We have been experimenting for the last one and a half years and you very rightly said that it is the first experiment of this kind in the world. We are experimenting whether mobile as a tool, voice as a platform work. What is happening in rural India is known to people in rural India but they are handicapped with two things- one is that they do not know the language of the people who can make the change, i.e. Hindi or English, and second is that they also do not know who these people are. And the problem with people like you and me is- the urban activists that is- we live in the cities. Our strength is that we know the right language and the right people but on most occasions we do not know the real situation because we do not travel to rural areas and specifically speaking tribal areas, we do not know the language also. As for instance, I do not know many journalists who know Gondi language or any tribal languages. So, what this platform does is simply link that connectivity between rural activism and urban activism. So, a person who lives in a rural area and has a problem, uses the language she knows, records that message in that platform and some moderators translate it into a language which is known to urban activists. They then take that problem to the right forum, may be to the ministry, to a newspaper or a court or wherever. So, we see some action and that completes this loop. When we at CGNet started looking at it, what we understood is that of course there are Maoists, of course there are Naxals, there are left and right wing extremists in every society but as we say jokingly sat that there are more left-wing extremists in Delhi or in London than in Bastar but it does not become a problem in London because these one or two people do not get joined by 95 people who are not Maoists. When we as journalists, go to a village in Chattisgarh, and because there are no tribal journalists and no journalists who understand the tribal languages, we end up reaching only a tiny minority of tribal upper class. Now an opinion of an upper class tribal may be of the majority as well but what is happening with this huge chunk of lower people or tribal community is that their views are not getting reflected, their problems are not getting highlighted because of the problem of the language. Let’s say if you were reporting about poverty in Calcutta and you spoke only with the people who spoke English since you know only English and you had no translator, so that would be bad reporting and that’s the kind of reporting that is happening in the tribal areas. So those 95 lower class people continue to remain unhappy. So what happens is that there are these Maoists and these 95 people who are not able to communicate because of these structural problems, are actually joining the Maoists though they are neither Maoists nor do they understand what they are talking about and it becomes India’s biggest internal security threat. So, what we are trying to do here is bridge this gap which exists between the rich and poor, between the tribals and the mainstream and the tool for that is a platform which is based on voice and a tool which is now available to majority of the people, i.e. mobile phone.
You have a Kashmir, you also have a POSCO issue in Odisha, and there are so many stories that are waiting to be told, so, any plans for expansion?
See, what we are doing is an experiment to democratize India and if it turns out to be useful, then people from all over will repeat or duplicate this experiment and that was the whole idea behind this experiment. As you said there are issues in Kashmir or in POSCO, if they want to use the platform we have created, they are welcome to do that. And if they want to create their own platform, our software is available on the website for download, they can start their own channel. We are trying to completely change the media field. If you look at the media, see you and I who are paid by a capital; capital which is concentrated in the cities, which is concentrated with the rich people, they employ people like you and me and we go down to the people to find out about them. It’s a top down approach; media is one of the most undemocratic institutions in today’s world. Before 1947, only two people decided what is good and what is bad but the same thing continues in journalism today. People like you and me, who are very small in number, we decide what is good. We decide that 100,000 people came in the city of Delhi, we put out a picture of a traffic jam this morning and say 5,000 people demonstrated in Jantar Mantar, that becomes news for 24×7. We decide, not the people. So, what we are trying to do is change this paradigm completely, make it upside down and make it democratic. We have to lower the entry level of journalism to democratize it and for doing so, the tool is voice and mobile phone and these kind of platforms which we are creating. So, let people report about what is happening around them, let hundreds and thousands of voices come to these kinds of platforms and people like us should crosscheck and verify this information which is coming from them. The power of deciding what news is and what is not should be shifted from us to the people.
What kind of infrastructural and financial problems do you face and what is your financial backing?
We do not have any financial backing at the moment. The software was created by MIT as a student project. As you very rightly said, our only station is in Bangalore, so a person who stays in Chattisgarh and is a tribal and poor, for them, to call Bangalore it costs them some 5-10 rupees per call, so that may not be big money for us but it is quite a lot for them. So, what we do now is subsidise that call by calling that person when that person leaves a missed call, but that is not our final model. Right now the server is sitting in Bangalore and so the people have to make long distance calls but if we can have servers closer to the people, the calls will become local and costs will be much cheaper. Then the cost of the project will also be less. We are currently experimenting, buying machines as this is the first such experiment in the world. So the cost is high and it is supported by a fellowship from the International Centre for Journalists.
Considering the number of calls you receive, there has to be a screening process. What is your editorial policy on that?
Editorial policy is that we are just a platform. We do not decide anything, people send us what they think is important to them. We do our normal journalistic checks that the call should be factual. It should not be an insinuation; the language should not be abusive. It’s normal journalistic practice, we do not choose the subject, we do not tell anyone what to report, we do not choose anything as good or bad.
Sometimes it has happened that when we have not been able to cross-check upto our satisfaction, then we have sat on stories, put out disclaimers. For example, 300 houses were burnt in Chattisgarh in the month of March. For 3 days these houses were burnt; on 11th, 14th and 16th, we received calls on all 3 days. But the problem was that none of the calls came from eye witnesses, so we could not cross-check and verify. We did not put out the story even though it was an important story. So we went to the Chief Minister. But not only did they do nothing about it, they spread negative stories about us in the newspapers, discredited this news. On 18th, we put out the story with a disclaimer that we had not reached any eye-witness, but since the story was so important, therefore, we were putting it out. The first story on the incident, in mainstream media, came out on 23rd March.
Now, with the kind of attention that CGNet is receiving, what kind of obstacles do you face?
There are sections of the society who love us because it is a very powerful tool to reach people and find out about their problems, but in this process, some vested interests get affected and those have been causing problems to us. Some of our citizen journalists have been threatened, our server has been put down 3 times in the last 6 months because we are the first mobile phone community radio in the world. But we are not doing anything illegal anyway. So, nobody can stop us by challenging our information flow legally. So, they need to act from behind the scenes. When we talk about our server, it is a part of that answer also when you ask about why we have our centre only in Bangalore. When we tried to put something in other cities, the server people were called by police and they did not allow us. Now I cannot bring this up because the people were not on the record and I do not have any proof. So, this has happened 3 times, it’s like not giving me a rented accommodation. What happened with Wikileaks was that when they were down, they couldcome back again in a few days but their address remained the same because it is wikileaks.org. But the problem with us is since we are linked to a phone number, it is like physically changing your house. So, when we change, our number also changes and it is like starting again from zero.
Then people exposing corruption in NREGA were harassed, then also one lady citizen journalist was forced to leave her house because the police had threatened the landlord, then one citizen journalist’s house was searched by police. But so many officers are using this platform fantastically.It happened this year with malaria. Earlier the government claimed that there were no cases of malaria but this year, because people started calling up, the number has gone up to 47, not that the deaths have gone up but the reporting was not happening before and when government started a programme of giving chloroquin, people called saying chloroquin does not work because the mosquitoes have developed a resistance to it. The government was forced to change their medicine, so, these kind of usages are also happening in various fields; in health, in NREGA, in ICDS…
There are three versions of the Land Acquisition Bill; one is the government’s 80:20 acquisition formula, then the National Advisory Council that advocates 100% acquisition by the government, and our Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, is suggesting that the government should not play any role in land acquisition. So, what’s your take on the land acquisition bill?
I am not an expert on land acquisition, as a journalist, I can have an opinion but it will not be a very informed opinion. Of course, land acquisition bill is one of the most important subjects discussed in CGNet Swara. As I said, our role is limited to creating a platform where people can report. So, unfortunately, I do not have an opinion on this subject.
So even as an urban activist, you have no opinion on our government’s almost neoliberal policies?
I would like to keep this interview about what we are doing, I am not an informed person…
We have created a platform that is neither pro-this, nor pro-that. The only policy we have is that there is nothing as such called ‘untouchables’. In my personal life, I have many opinions on many things but when we are talking about this experiment, I do not have any opinion. We are a neutral platform… For example there are people who are pro-Salwa Judum and also people who are anti-Salwa Judum, but both the sections are a part of this platform.
