People’s website of Chhattisgarh
Description
CGnet is a Citizen Journalism platform where we discuss and act on subject of development of Chhattisgarh and its people.
What we deliver
Contents on CGnet are produced by CGnet members who are Citizen Journalists. We are trying to use all the local languages.
Whom we deliver
CGnet discussion forum sees more than 200 communication from members each month. The membership is more than 1100 and in CGnet face to face annual meetings the attendance has increased from 75 to more than 200 now.
Why is the project unique?
CGnet is one of the few e Communities with also have regular face to face meetings as well. CGnet community comes together in small groups and do their own project. Like CGnet has small communities on subjects like RTI, NREGA, community Radio.
Roadmap
We dream that media will be democratised with the help of ICT one day. Like politics was democratised in 1947, we feel the need of a peoples media, where every citizen will play an active role. we did not leave politics to Rajas and Maharajas after 1947, similarly we can not leave journalism to corporates only if we want to strengthen our democracy. We in CGnet have understood that Community Radio stations can complement the drums which was a traditional tool for communication for tribals. And internet can connect thees Community Radio stations. In this way the news will be prepared by people and will reach the people with help from ICT. This will be real democratisation of communication. We are seeing the result of breakdown of communication in the form of escalated violence in the tribal areas of Chhattisgarh and would like to reverse it. After 60 years of Independence Chhattisgarh do not have even a single news bulletin in local tribal languages forget about any education in that language. We are developing CGnet as a depository of that language which needs help from all of us. ICT and audio content uploading is a great tool in this endevour as tribal community is very rich in oral traditions and poor in writing. We hope we will be able to take forward these rich tribal languages with the help of ICT tools. We in CGnet believe that it is better to communicate and disagree rather than our firearms doing the talking to each other. We have amde our first rule that no one is untouchable in this e Panchayat. We may disagree with the people using violence but we also need to listen and understand to them if we want to solve our problems. CGnet is one of the very few e Communities which meets face to face every year atleast once. We are doing it from last 4 years. We invite people who are not on the e Community but are doing work which interests us or affect us to improve our understanding. For example in last Dream CG meet 3 in December 2007 we invited members of Essar Steel to spend time with tribals who will loose land if the factory comes up. We hope both sides improved their understanding about each other after this interaction. We try to do the same on each subject. Maoists are also members of CGnet as are Police officials, bureaucrats and political leaders. This is the only platform where there is some communication between these factions otherwise in a war. This is a great gift of ICT. If you look at CGnet discussion forum it has provided more news than what all the mainstream media have contributed all together from places like Dantewada and Bijapur. Mainstream corporate media has its strength and uses and Citizen Journalism platform like CGnet complements when corporate media fails as it has in some parts in Chhattisgarh. A platform like CGnet only complements mainstream media and is not in any competition. We mainly try to raise the subjects which mainstream media does not or can not raise for any reason. And we have been seeing its increased coverage in mainstream media once a Citizen Media platform like CGnet raises it.
Contact
CGnet
Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India
