We are all set to see off another year. Many of us are making new year resolutions, impossible promises to ourselves and setting grand goals.
Not me. I just wanted to sit down to write this year-end piece. It was to be a reflective, introspective and peaceful exercise, but putting my pen to paper turned out to be anything but that.
As I looked back, trying to isolate those incidents and experiences that deserved mention in this write up, I was overwhelmed. The highs and lows, the hits and misses, the self-doubts and recriminations I had experienced rushed into my mind along with a hit of adrenaline.
Thinking of it, in many ways 2022 has been like any other year. Yet, it has also been like no other year before.
For Gaon Connection, it has been a milestone year. India’s biggest rural communication and insights company, celebrated its tenth anniversary on December 2. It has been a decade of hard hitting journalism thanks to its foot soldiers.
Gaon Connection‘s journey has been gruelling, yet immensely satisfying for its members as they have worked to bring to the fore the voice of two-thirds of India’s population (over 900 million people) that lives in the rural heartland, and despite the boom in digital media platforms, remains largely in the dark.
‘Mainstream’ reporters rarely travel to rural India (unless there is a a gang-rape, or a natural calamity leading to great loss of life), and rural inhabitants rarely get invited to the brightly-lit, news studios in the metropolises.
In such a deep urban-rural divide, Gaon Connection, with its mantra of ‘तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय’, has been shining the light on the far-flung and oft ignored villages of the country. Nothing has stopped it, not the nationwide lockdown nor the straight-out-of-hell second wave of COVID-19. Through it all Gaon Connection has remained a committed chronicler of rural India.
In the times of extraordinary pain and sufferings, Gaon Connection, along with its army of community journalists, rose to the occasion and travelled widely to document what was happening in the hundreds of thousands villages.
Despite budgetary constraints, Gaon Connection continued its work through 2022. It filed reports on the drop in wheat production, drought situations in villages in the Indo-Gangetic belt and the post-monsoon floods, to ensure the good and the bad times of rural inhabitants do not go unnoticed or undocumented.
On August 15 this year, as India celebrated its 75th Independence Day, Gaon Connection launched Gaon Radio, a national audio streaming platform from rural India.
Gaon Radio is Gaon Connection‘s internet-based radio, which is one more step in the direction of empowering rural citizens, many of whom are still unlettered, with information. It provides a national platform to farmer groups, rural self-help groups, artisans, and folk artistes.
Next time you tune in to Gaon Radio on Gaon Connection‘s website, you may be pleasantly surprised to listen to folk songs in Bhojpuri, Garhwali, Dogri, Kashmiri, and several other local languages and dialects.
It will not be incorrect to say that Gaon Connection is today the country’s biggest rural communication platform with content ranging from video, audio and text formats.
There is more. Gaon Connection Insights – which surveys India’s rural hinterland, and documents rural insights in the form of books and reports — released two important reports this year.
In March 2022, Gaon Connection released its annual publication — The State of Rural India Report 2021. It is a unique compendium of 14 themes and 60 stories that define the key happenings and developments in India’s villages that year.
These broad themes covered in the annual publication include The Second Wave; Health; Agriculture; Livelihood; Water; Disasters; Forest and Wildlife; Climate Change; Adivasi; Gender Matters; Education, Youth & Sports; Art, Craft & Tradition; Agents of Change; and Food, Festival & Culture.
Also Read: Gaon Connection releases ‘The State of Rural India Report 2021’
Further, on December 2 on Gaon Connection’s tenth anniversary, it released another 250-page report — 50 Success Stories of Rural Women in the Pandemic — which is a collection of stories of extraordinary courage, grit and determination of village women who stood up to the pandemic.
The 250-page ebook deals with the travails, hopes, innovations and successes of rural women. These are usually shadow women, who are rarely seen and never heard. But, Gaon Connection searched them out, spoke to them, heard their stories, recorded their achievements and brought them to the attention of the world at large.
Both The State of Rural India Report 2021, and 50 Success Stories of Rural Women in the Pandemic are available for a free download on Gaon Connection‘s website. And so are its other publications.
Gaon Connection‘s network of community journalists and community resource persons, are spread across 425 districts of the country. These rural reporters hail from villages and small towns, and have been trained in MoJo (mobile journalism) by the multimedia team of Gaon Connection.
And in 2022, a story filed by Ramji Mishra, community journalist of Gaon Connection, who lives in Bramhavali village in Uttar Pradesh, received national recognition. His report, Once an integral part of rural households, cattle are now conspicuous by their absence. Will they return to revive the rural economy? was nominated in the business and economy journalism category of Red Ink Awards for Excellence in Journalism, given by the Mumbai Press Club.
The year 2022 has been eventful for Gaon Connection that despite its small team has dared to dream big. And, in the process has given hundreds of villages in the country a place in the limelight.
Nidhi Jamwal is Managing Editor of Gaon Connection. Views are personal.
