India’s most popular development website Infochangeindia.org, providing independent reportage on social justice and sustainable development issues in India, will soon be completing 10 years online. The website, managed by the Pune-based Centre for Communication and Development Studies (CCDS), an advocacy and social change resource centre, was one of India’s earliest free-access knowledge-building and knowledge-sharing projects.
The portal has thousands of pages of original content created by scores of committed development writers and analysts reporting from the corners of India. Its readers are not just development professionals and policymakers. But equally students, members of marginalised groups, farmers looking to go organic, citizens looking to set up rainwater harvesting units, women at home fighting for their rights, gay and variously-disabled people.
That’s the success story.
But here’s the catch: Free-access knowledge-building, though largely built on a voluntary base, also needs funds. And those funds are becoming difficult to come by.
Although Infochangeindia’s content is reaching thousands of people and reputed media organisations such as the Economist and the Huffington Post cite their content as do hundreds of educational institutions, textbook publishers and e-learning portals, since the objective of the website is to create a forum for social change, no user is charged for this content.
Funding poses a tough challenge in an environment where donors increasingly demand tangible and quantifiable impacts. It’s easier to raise funds for a primary school or a watershed project, which have an emotional connect.
It is not so easy to demonstrate the difference this kind of project makes, as it feeds into advocacy at the international, national and local levels.
Hutokshi Doctor, one of the founders of CCDS and editor of Infochangeindia, points out: “Communication is at the heart of social change. We wanted to create an open space for independent, well-researched and professionally-presented information and analysis on development and social justice issues. Our knowledge base has become so extensive that it is read by 720,000 readers per annum who collectively read and download roughly 48,00,000 pages of a content in the course of a year.”
Four years after the launch of the website, CCDS decided to reach out to readers beyond the internet and introduced a print publication called Infochange Agenda. This quarterly provided in-depth research on a particular subject and has over the years provided comprehensive coverage on varied issues whether it be the occupational health and safety of workers in the informal sector or ways to report conflict situations. Agenda was the first to bring out comprehensive coverage of the impact of climate change on coastal India, and the first to provide comprehensive coverage of the political economy of water.
Besides reaching out through the Internet and print, the group also decided they needed to reach out one-on-one to young urban Indians through a programme called Open Space, which encourages young adults to see the world through different lens.
`We wanted them to join the dots and see the systems that perpetuate inequality and poverty in the country,’ said John Samuel, one of the founders of CCDS and a well known development activist.
Open Space, one of the most unique outreach programmes in the country, works primarily with young people. Its team goes to colleges and youth venues holding discussions around key developmental issues and introducing these issues through cinema, theatre, literature and music, trying to help young people make more informed decisions about their personal and political lives.
“We don’t need more social workers, we need more responsible, informed and ethical doctors, lawyers, architects, teachers, engineers, civil servants, husband, fathers and mothers,’ says Mr Doctor.
They have also branched out into documentary films for online viewing. Topics of these films include the destruction of Goa’s environment by indiscriminate mining, the waste recycling industry in Mumbai, and the problems of refugees in India.
These films have been made on shoe-string budgets of `30,000-50,000 . Some have won awards including the Delhi chief minister’s award for best film on environmental conservation at the Vatavaran Film Festival 2009. Others have been invited to international festivals including the Munich International Documentary Film Festival and the Montreal Human Rights Film festival.
Given that Infochangeindia’s content has enormous credibility and is positioned in the top 10-20 of most internet searches for issues on development in India, it has enormous potential for growth. India needs a knowledge-based society, especially one which freely allows accurate and well-researched content to be accessed beyond closed seminar rooms and the corridors of power.