We’re delighted to share our progress over the last couple of months; our network of Community Correspondents has been reporting on a wide range of issues from the rights of indigenous communities to primary education and rural healthcare. As always, we are also working towards scaling hyperlocal impact. Reproductive rights is a major focus area for us and an area where we’re especially working on creating more impact in. We’re grateful for your support in the cause and happy to share some of our stories from the field here.
Correspondent Chetan Salve reports from a predominantly tribal region in Western India. A year ago, he unearthed a major loophole in one of India’s largest reproductive rights schemes. The gap in the scheme was depriving women in need of the maternity benefits that they were entitled to, compelling them to toil on the fields in the ninth month of pregnancy and right after childbirth. Chetan produced a video report on the issue and used social media, particularly WhatsApp, to take the story all the way up to the state’s highest legislative body. This prompted the Ministry of Finance to sanction 40 million rupees (USD 613,200) to ensure that the scheme reached the intended beneficiaries.
Over five women die every hour in India owing to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications. The reasons, to name a few, are lack of healthcare facilities, non-implementation of schemes, lack of information and poor quality of care. Chetan’s story is illustrative of how grassroots media can hold governments accountable and monitor their performance.
Your support can help network produce more reports on crucial issues of healthcare and rights and help us amplify women’s voices.
At VV, over the last one year, our Community Correspondents have been monitoring the availability, accessibility and quality of maternal health services and schemes from a rights-based perspective. We are particularly focusing on respectful and ethical care, the centrality of women’s experiences in reproductive rights, and on community action in promoting reproductive rights. In Rajasthan, for instance, Shambhulal Khatik looked at the importance of women being decision-makers at the hyperlocal level in matters pertaining to reproductive rights.
Another area of focus is the role of caregivers, especially of community health workers who are, in essence, the foot soldiers of India’s public health system.In West Bengal, Susanti Indwar reported on the role community health workers are playing in increasing the number of institutional deliveries. West Bengal also has a severe shortage of ambulances which affects institutional delivery rates. When a woman in Bikash Barman’s village had to deliver her baby at home, which led to complications, he resolved to solve the problem and did-- through a video report and regular follow-ups with the district authorities.
In another part of the state, Jahanara Bibi documented the story of health workers counselling men to undergo sterilisation in an attempt to break away from the stigma attached to male sterilisation. Interestingly, Chetan has even taken a step forward and decided to undergo a sterilisation operation himself to dispel myths about the procedure and its effects.
In Jharkhand, a state with a maternal mortality ratio much below the national average, Shanti Baraik and Shikha Pahadin looked at the state of the biggest government hospitals in their respective districts. The differences were startling; while Shikha heard stories of abuse and negligence, Shanti’s video featured satisfied new mothers. Shikha is now working to change things at the hospital she reported on.
Our correspondents have also looked at institutional delivery and maternal health in Jharkhand through a data survey. Data surveys are conducted as part of our Surveys for Action project which seeks to close the data gap in rural India.
We hope to conduct more surveys of the kind and produce more reports that help make the public health system efficient. Your support can help us step-up our impact and build a better system of reproductive rights for women in India. Donate now!
Two years ago, a young girl in the East Indian state of Jharkhand lost her mother, who was brutally killed, along with four other women, for being branded a ‘witch’. ‘Witch-hunting’, deeply rooted in patriarchy, continues to cast a dark spell in parts of India, even today. The case immediately caught the attention of VV Community Correspondent, Nirmala Ekka, who joined forces with a legal aid organisation. It resulted in a two-year long fight to ensure monetary compensation and a fear-free environment for the victims’ families. Today, more than a dozen people are in jail for the killings.
At VV, patriarchy is something we actively seek to document and dismantle through our stories. In August, we got together for our biennial jamboree to recognise and celebrate the amazing work that Nirmala and our countrywide network of 248 Community Correspondents do, everyday, in addressing patriarchy, caste-discrimination, corruption and more.
At the gathering, we ideated and rolled out new ways of expanding our grassroots and digital activism, especially around violence against women and patriarchy. Mobile journalism, a medium that all our Community Correspondents are being trained in, was identified as one of the best ways to strengthen citizen engagement. With the arrival of the internet in villages, correspondents can use their phones to shoot and edit short videos and get onto Facebook and WhatsApp to build communities and get their rural neighbours to take action.
While women in rural India continue talking about issues like property rights, gender mannerisms and patriarchy in religion in our village-level discussion clubs, we’ve also been engaging our urban, digital audiences through Facebook and Twitter. Leading South Asian feminist organisations have participated in our regular online engagements which have culminated in a wealth of opinions and insights on inheritance laws, women’s labour and inequality in marriage. With our Twitter Chats and other online engagements, we’re connecting our grassroots work to global conversations on gender, patriarchy and rights.
This year, we have also recruited 21 new correspondents from the northern states of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. These states, nestled in the Himalayas, are major biodiversity hubs and were chosen because of the adverse effects of climate change on the indigenous, minority communities living there.
With 248 Community Correspondents in such critically important areas on board, we will be going where no newsroom has ever gone before.
With more and more mobile journalism videos coming in from the vast network each day, we hope to bring out stories from the most media-dark regions of the country, and to better lives by empowering people to tell their own stories. Re-energised after the biennial meet, some of our Correspondents have begun to train other members of their communities in video activism as well!
Our correspondents draw their support from their peers, their communities and from global audiences and donors like you. As the year-end fundraising season begins, especially with #GivingTuesday round the corner, help VV get a strong start by sponsoring our upcoming mobile journalism training for women Community Correspondents. Donate today!
VV’s newly launched website is finally ready for prime time and brimming with amazing new content.
The new videovolunteers.org shows the real India as it is lived by its citizens, and documents the myriad struggles taking place to make it a more equitable country. We invite you to explore the website today.
Find a story, and then help create a solution. Many of the stories have corresponding actions, such as this one on crumbling infrastructure in child care centres or this one on taxation of menstrual hygiene products. With these ‘take action’ videos, the audience can make a difference and engage directly -- whether by contacting officials or signing petitions, sharing videos and even volunteering.
If you are looking for inspiration, check out some of the impact videos. These focus on solution-oriented journalism and show how common technology like video cameras and mobile phones create more transparency and expose injustices in rural India. These impact videos also take the audience behind the scenes into Video Volunteers’ rural journalism enterprise and show how Correspondents manage to get an impact with 30% of their videos.
In other news, we are all hard at work preparing for our bi-annual National Meet next month. More than 200 Community Correspondents will come together from across India for five days of learning and inspiration and celebration of successes.
You are someone who has made a difference to Video Volunteers, and so we would like to invite you to be part of the National Meet. If you have thought about coming to Goa, now is the time to come!
Part of the focus at the Meet is mobile journalism. The arrival of the internet in villages, and in particular WhatsApp, is an opportunity to overlay digital activism onto already vibrant community-level activism - and for Video Volunteers to scale our work by changing the way our Correspondents make videos. From June 2017, all new VV Correspondents are editing the videos they shoot on a mobile phone and directly sharing it on WhatsApp and Facebook. This is a significant advance from the traditional video-making process and VV is thrilled to be at the cutting edge of bringing scalable video production to remote areas of the country. At the National Meet, Senior Correspondents will learn to train their neighbours as mobile journalists, and to use the internet to build communities, share their videos, and get their rural neighbours to take action.
We are eager for our Correspondents to be in Goa, so we can hear all of their ideas about spreading digital video in rural India, and come up with some new innovations. Please join us and be part of the fun!
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VV was founded because of a visceral anger that women’s voices are the most silenced in society, and that women’s issues are what is least discussed in public spaces and the halls of power. Today, our own network of more than 200 Community Correspondents comprises 56% women and every video-activist, women and men alike, is committed to gender equality.
This year, one of the projects we're most proud of is our campaign ‘Dismantle Patriarchy.’ This campaign aims to start conversations around gender biases in day-to-day life through stories of women and men, who face, negotiate and challenge everyday patriarchy.
50 Community Correspondents across 16 states are running discussion clubs, where women gather to watch videos and then discuss gender-based discrimation and violence, and actions they can take to stop it. These clubs are helping women take courageous steps, on the small invisible aspects of patriarchy that few are aware of, let alone discuss.
In Community Correspondent's Yashodra's club, women organized to help a widow participate in the ceremonies at her daughter's wedding. Though this was her 4th child's wedding, she'd never been allowed to get close to her children during the wedding. Why? Because she's a widow, and widows are bad luck. After watching a video about the practice of veiling, the conversation had led to ways that widows are oppressed, and the group decided to help their friend take the momentous step of speaking up for her rights in this most sacred of Indian traditions, a wedding ceremony.
In Community Correspondent's Rohini's club, women laughed and laughed as they said their husband's name for the first time in their lives, out loud. In their communities it is expected that a woman considers her husband as her God, and so it is disrespectful to address him by his direct name. Many of the husband's protested, but months later, for many of the women, they are finding equality in the conversations they have at home.
There are numerous other stories emerging from these clubs, related to work allocations, education of daughters and the rights to file domestic violence complaints. They all stem from our visceral belief at Video Volunteers that the first step in ending oppression is to speak about it.
I would like to close this report with my favorite childhood ‘starfish story,’ which I often think of as I walk on the beach near my home in Goa, India, with my sons. One day a mother was on the beach picking up star fish that were washed away during high tide. "Why are you doing that, Mom?" asks her daughter. "There are so many. How can that make a difference?" "Well," said the mother, " it made a difference to this one”. Every day our Community Correspondents amaze me with their steadfast belief that one person CAN make a difference. I invite you to watch and share their videos, and join our effort in any way you can.
In gratitude,
Jessica
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The first lesson many young Indian girls learn at school is their place: Last Place.
During lunchtime girls and boys are frequently separately according to their caste. This division will last for the rest of their lives.
Imagine your daughter’s or sister’s first day of school and their excitement and nervousness at the thought of making new friends and starting an education. By the end of day one she has learned that she, like the family she loves, is worth less than her classmates and, worse, she’s less clean too. She’s the worst of India.
She’s learned and internalized what it means to be an “Untouchable”.
In India, what is taught in the schoolyard permeates throughout Indian society. Lives stunted by discrimination and abuse justified by nothing more than an accident of birth; the caste children happen to be born into. The so-called “Untouchables” -- who call them themselves Dalits – are among India’s most socially marginalized communities. Dalits must withstand being demeaned, stigmatized and mistreated according to the whims and pleasures of their betters.
Video Volunteers has an important campaign to expose the truth about India’s real “untouchables” – the abusers and exploiters who act with near immunity. The corrupt who believe they’re free to mistreat India’s most vulnerable, the Dalits.
YOU’RE INVITED to stand in solidarity with our work with brave individuals from the most discriminated against community in India. You can bear witness – literally – to the abuses these brave Community Correspondents are catching on video.
The Community Correspondents have captured some amazing visuals: A maid working in an upper caste home was paid for her services by standing at a distance and having the family fling food at her like charity into the folds of her sari. When a thirsty youth drank water from a pot meant for other castes, he was abused, assaulted and his hands were nearly chopped off.
Choose not to look the other way. Watch the Untouhability videos.
Untouchability has been illegal since independence, for 67 years, but the government largely fails to enforce this law and this stigma continues to exist in the hearts and minds of people. Cases of abuse and physical assault on Dalits continue with a terrifyingly high frequency in Indian society.
But real change is happening –and the Dalit are leading this change. Video Volunteers’ campaign to enforce the criminalization of this stigma is breaking through – and you can help.
Armed with video cameras, a sense of self-respect and an eye for the opportune moment, many Dalit are fighting back- simply by catching their abusers on tape!
Video Volunteers’ Dalit Community Correspondents are as radical as they are inspirational: Brave, dignified, agents for a more just, accountable and transparent society. They’re taking the risks, gathering the evidence and exposing abuse.
Don’t let their courage and their efforts go to waste. Watch the videos. And if inspired, please support financially Video Volunteers’ innovative and stunningly effective campaign. Help these brave women and men reform society.
Thank you for standing with India’s Dalit Community Correspondents.
Thank you
Jessica
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