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Magazine
Statehood: Good for the media?
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If one were to look at the core issues which affect the quality of life for the majority population in our newly formed States, it would be the environment in Uttaranchal, and issues of food security and employment in Jharkhand and Chattisgarh. SEVANTI NINAN analyses whether these are interesting subjects for journalists, in the conclusion of a two-part article.
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THE newspaper with the largest readership in this country, the Dainik Bhaskar, claiming to be second only in the world to the Asahi Shimbun, has an occasionally novel approach to manning its news bureaus. When you get to Jagdalpur, the capital of Bastar district, you discover that its chief of bureau is a local businessman who had never done a day's journalism before he was recruited. He was hired for some very practical reasons one is told, and has no problem delivering what is required of him journalistically: he just hires journalists to do the stories.
In Raipur, senior journalists with the same paper are slightly embarrassed by this appointment but say it was made directly from Bhopal where the owners of Bhaskar are based. Actually there isn't much room for embarrassment: all kinds of colourful people spearhead newspaper expansion in Chattisgarh. A third of the way from Jagdalpur to Raipur is Kondagaon, and the newspaper's interests here are overseen by a local transporter who is the Bhaskar's circulation agent and also doubles as a journalist. His local competition, the man for Nav Bharat, manages an STD booth. Journalism is a very elastic skill in these parts, you do it along with everything else. And if you are a stringer, you are not paid for your labours though nobody stops you from printing a visiting card claiming correspondent status, and lording it around.
Regional newspapers are expanding all across the Hindi belt. In Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttaranchal, as in the States from which they have been carved out — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — the name of the game is localisation. Going local means printing multiple editions with separate pages for different districts or regions. These pages carry loads of local news generated from not just towns but increasingly from villages as well.
And the unpaid foot soldiers of this expansion are the stringers. They could be shopkeepers, farmers, auto mechanics, lawyers or teachers. They all claim to have developed news sense on the job. And they keep the flag of journalism flying in these parts. Local adhikaris are transferred because of our stories, they tell you proudly.
Aggressive localisation is the regional media's response to competition from television, and regional TV channels in particular. Localisation has become possible because of the increase in literacy, particularly rural literacy.
It is the defining characteristic of media in the new States. And while it is very good for media owners, leading to increased circulation and innovative local advertising, it has two chief characteristics which can be problematic. Local editions are so narrowly local that they do not carry news of other districts in the State. And local news, given the people who supply it, is itsy bitsy in nature, not measuring up to the kind of coverage that might help to give direction to the development of these States.
The Navbharat has seven editions in the State, all printed out of Raipur, but the news and even the pages come by fax from different centres. The Dainik Bhaskar has seven editions printed out of Raipur and four out of Bilaspur. The local pages are crammed with small news items, often emanating from villages. Civil society in these States has quickly deduced, however, that excessive localisation has its drawbacks, because all State news, does not reach all corners of the State. The resident editor of the Navbharat in Raipur, A.P. Shukla thinks that this is logical: the news published is so local that 90 per cent of it has no wider value. He also feels that the fact that every local edition of his paper carries a rajdhani page with news emanating from the State capital has helped to bond people into a Chattisgarhi identity, down to the villages.
But much is made of the negative aspect of localisation. Ramu Shrivastava, bureau chief of Hari Bhoomi in Raipur says, "tomorrow if you unleash POTA in one corner of the State, if there is repression, a ripple does not get created. This is a serious issue." Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Brij Mohan Agarwal, says all State news should be carried throughout the State, but that does not happen because of these editions.
Says Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, "I have to read at least five newspapers to know what is happening in my State. If the Chief Minister makes a policy statement on Jagdalpur it does not go to Raigarh or Sarguja. There should be some way by which some things should be known to everybody." One major concern which activist groups working in the State have is that you cannot build a movement statewide on any issue if the news of something that happens in one part of the State does not reach the other.
Deshbandhu, a paper which has a self-proclaimed focus on development news and has won 10 Statesman rural reporting awards in 20 years, is uncomfortable with the negative aspects of localisation and has experimented back and forth with how much of the State news it makes available to all parts of the State. One decision it has taken is to carry news of people's movements in all editions of the newspaper.
NGOs in Jharkhand and Uttaranchal have the same problem — between increased attention to political news emanating from the capital cities, and a proliferation of small local news, issues that could focus on the region's development fall by the wayside. In all three States, the media is cheerfully obliging about printing handouts so that if you were to do an analysis of content over a period of time, it would reveal that the most space is given to a category called samanya khabar (ordinary news): everyday news of murders, robberies, deaths, ribbon cuttings, political statements, dharnas and so on. Amar Ujala's man in Nainital identifies the three most prolific sources of news: individuals, political press releases, and civic organisations of various kinds.
Both Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran have opened up employment opportunities in Uttaranchal by appointing a correspondent for every single district headquarters, and a stringer at the tehsil level. They have big networks, but these tend to generate miscellaneous local news, which panders to people's egos, as well as bring in advertising by suggesting special supplements at the micro-level. Says the Times of India's correspondent here, R.P. Nailwal, "Stringers have to have some fire within them to bring problems of local people alive and keep it in focus, but there are very few such stringers." In Bastar, an angry stringer says he has the fire, but the paper does not even pay for petrol for his motorbike to go into the interior and chase stories of neglect or exploitation.
A month-long monitoring of the Palamau and Santhal Parghana editions of the Hindustan and Prabhat Khabar in Jharkhand produced mountains of samanya khabar as the single largest category. There was ample news related to health, education, women's oppression, sport-culture, communal tension and murder-loot-dacoity, but mostly of the itsy bitsy kind. What got left out? In Palamau, the team of women doing the monitoring recorded an acute shortage of reports and news analysis on hunger and poverty related problems. Palamau is in the rain shadow area and before the partition of Bihar, was declared a drought prone area. Relief work is always going on in this place. There has been a paucity of this kind of news here. Where do people go when they migrate and what are the reasons for migration? No report investigated these issues.
There was also absence of coverage of corruption among NGOs in this region.
There was also absence of coverage of corruption among NGOs in this region.
During a June 2002 monitoring of the Santhal Parghanas edition of both Prabhat Khabar and Hindustan, a three-month long search for justice for the rape of a woman in this area by an NGO worker came to an end when he surrendered to the chief judicial magistrate in Dumka. But amazingly, neiter newspaper covered this development.
If you were to look at the one or two core issues which affect the quality of life for the majority population in these States, it would be environment in Uttaranchal, and issues of food security and employment in Jharkhand and Chattisgarh. None of these is sexy subjects for journalists.
In Jharkhand, interestingly, tribal and non tribal journalists differ in their perception of priority issues. For non tribal journalists, infrastructure and governance are of concern, for adivasi scribes, issues of land, forest and livelihood for the tribal population.
Ramdeo Vishwabandhu who works in Giridhi district among dalits says that a number of issues concerning the fate of adivasis in Jharkhand simply do not make it into the newspapers because the non-adivasi journalists who run the papers and write for them do not go into such issues in depth. "They do not understand Jharkhand." He also adds that when newspapers and journalists are looking for stories, they are not necessarily looking for the truth at the ground level.
In a broad sense, environment is the central issue in Uttaranchal. It always was, for this region located in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Development is governed by the fact that there are constraints that the economy of a hill region has, regardless of whether or not an independent state has been constituted. Industrialisation is not environmentally sustainable, employment through tourism has to be created without damaging a fragile ecosystem. Development means meeting the needs of the population, of which the foremost are livelihood and water. Both have clear environmental implications. So even as media proliferates here, its primary challenge is to engage with issues that are related to the environment, both in a broad and narrow sense.
Both by temperament and training, the average reporter in the field is ill-equipped to provide sustained, contextual reporting on the larger issues. Add to these the constraints of time, resources, and access in a hilly State, and reporting on what is most relevant to this State becomes highly unsatisfactory and inadequate. Local newspapers are full of water shortage stories, but there is not enough analysis or proper focus on the larger problem.
Finally, the bureaucracy and the media take a dim view of each other. In all three States, journalists tell you that the worst bureaucrats have been inherited from the parent state, that officers are not committed to their work because they are still shuttling between Patna and Ranchi, Bhopal and Raipur and Lucknow and Dehra Dun, with families being retained in the former State capitals. And the odd bureaucrat who will speak his mind tells you why he has no use for journalists in his State. Says a Secretary level officer in Dehra Dun, "The media will say, naya state ban gaya, kuch nahi ho ra hai. (A new state has been formed, but nothing is happening.") So? Milk and honey will flow?" What is a realistic time frame after which change can be expected to be discernible in the newly created State? Another Secretary in the same State said earlier this year, "It takes one year just to settle down. In one and a half years (since the State's formation in November 2000) enough has been done. Five years is one plan period, that is a realistic period in which to judge performance." But that is no use to a journalist. He needs a story now.
(With inputs from Manjula Lal in Kumaon and Vasavi in Ranchi.)
(Concluded)
The first part of this article appeared in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, issue dated September 22, 2002.
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