India

The Alliance of Journalists in Asia is continuing the objectives that it developed to build up a community of ‘socially engaged journalists’.

We do this through the following ways:

• creating small clusters of journalists who meet informally to strengthen their work on social and ecological reporting.

• to inter-act with students from colleges of journalists to strengthen their understanding of social and ecological issues.

• to organise meetings around specific social and ecological themes where journalists are brought together along with social activists and socially concerned intellectuals.

Since our last report we have continued to deepen the above objectives. Below is a brief recapitulation of some activities of the past few months.

The first meeting was on the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (27th-30th July). This is an important programme where people are promised employment for 100 days of the year in half of the districts of the country.

Another important issue that The Journalists Alliance got journalists to participate in was a programme to re-think schools for indigenous peoples. Schools for indigenous peoples are in a poor state, both materially and in terms of the understanding of education. This programme is trying to mobilise government, indigenous social movements, education experts and NGOs to re-think these schools and make them more relevant to the conditions that indigenous peoples live in.

Journalist participated in an Asian workshop in June (last week), where participants came from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bangladesh and India. The workshop was on the theme of the role of a Rainbow Alliance (secular activists, spiritual activists and religious activists) in promoting social and ecological change. One of the key objectives of the workshop was to find strategies to promote conflict-resolution in contexts of religious fundamentalism. Journalists from Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka were also associated.

Future directions:

We hope to continue developing the informal network of journalists. We have found that making the network formal creates controversy and accusations of ’making use of journalists’ for our own purposes. Even if this accusation does not come from journalists, the owners of the media are suspicious.

We need to slowly build up support among jounalists, the owners of the media and the public to evolve a new policy that is not merely commercial and info-tainment.

Next year we hope to have a conference (with the support of our informal network) that can evaluate the role of the media in fighting social exclusion and promoting ecological renewal.