Shubhranshu Choudhary | Mobile Media and Adivasi Communities: Democracy from Below in Rural India?

Join journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary, recipient of the 2014 Google Digital Activism Award, as he outlines an experiment of democratization of communication from the Central tribal region of India. He will discuss the creation of a simple, low-cost, democratic media outlet that could be run by locals -the disenfranchised and marginalized people in Chhatisgarh- in their own Gondi language. The ubiquitous mobile phones became the main tool in the creation of CGNet Swara- the first cell-phone-based news and current affairs network. Since February 2010, it has led to more than 300,000 reports from citizen journalists on a range of issues from spread of malaria, to unpaid wages, to human rights violations and really transformed the ways in which voices from Chhatisgarh could travel all over the world.

About the Speaker: Shubhranshu Choudhary has worked with the BBC TV and Radio as the South Asia Producer in the 1990s and early 2000s. He grew up in Chhatisgarh, went to the local school and worked as a reporter at a Hindi newspaper in Raipur before joining the BBC. Drawn back to his home state, he left BBC and went back to Chhatisgarh to report on the conditions there with the help of a Knight International Journalism Fellowship.