Video Volunteers an organization which puts out short videos to highlight issues has launched a unique movement to empower voices from the rural communities in India. Buland Bol, a programme offering free of cost media training to students and citizens in video making, social media publishing and reaching content to a larger audience. This initiative is taken, not only to report stories from the marginalized sections but also to resolve and bring a change.
Currently, 50 students have enrolled for this programme from Goa and their training has been scheduled for April. The organization has approached different NGOs and colleges to offer this training.
Manish Kumar, the training director said, “Only two percent of news comes from rural areas, rest of the news in mainstream media which consist of politics, entertainment and sports.” The focus of the organisation is mainly on media students to introduce them to rural reporting, where everyone desires to work for mainstream media because of its charm. The organisation which was first started in Ahmadabad and then later shifted to Goa in 2008. In 2003 they first started they by tying with a NGO and started a community video unit. With the help of the NGO they would train five to six people in that village, who would then make short videos about issues in that village and then screened in that village. It was done around the country but it was an expensive operation. They then decided to train one person in the village after giving him a pocket camera. He would then record events and send it over to Goa where it would be edited by the production team and the uploaded on to the website. The person on the ground would work to create an impact by meeting the people that mattered in the village and find solutions.
Bulbond was the later avatar with short clips being uploaded on social media. In Goa, they have talked to various colleges and they are going to train around 50 students and they will also be trained to find solutions to the problems they would be highlighting in their video clips. They are also talking to NGO’s who are interested in their employees receiving training on this front.
Prior to Buland Bol, Video Volunteers had launched India Unheard, a programme which was started in 2010 to acknowledge rural reporting and give people a platform to learn community journalism. In the first phase, 31 people from 22 different states were enrolled, thereafter more than 200 correspondents were added gradually.
(A student of Journalism at the St Xaviers College, Mapusa interning with Herald TV)
