P. S. Deodhar - On Creating A Well-Informed Bharat

ON CREATING A WELL-INFORMED BHARAT

It is feared that, in this Knowledge Age, we might end up creating another deep valley between the urban elite of India and the praja of Bharat. Praja, in addition to being economically disadvantaged, is growingly becoming information starved. In spite of the telecom revolution in the country and in spite of the rapid proliferation of television channels, the kind of information that would benefit masses is not being disseminated. There is therefore a need to harness currently available Media Technologies for enriching the rural people with appropriate information. If we don't, it will progressively hurt their gainful employment, improvements in their productivity, their work efficiency and even their well-being. These powerful Information Technology tools have to become more Bharat-centric than the 'West'-centric, Internet access and databases must be in local languages. Media companies should exploit the Radio, the Television and the Internet more imaginatively. Unlike what is commonly believed all this activity is indeed commercially very rewarding. Bharat is far bigger market than urban India. Educating Bharat is in the interest of business. Informed Bharat would become India's greatest strength and asset in the global market place. China has proved this. If we ignore this reality, there is a great danger that we, as a nation, may be left behind and fail to keep in step with the fast pace of the global economic development. Let us not forget that much better information equipped Chinese are already a way ahead of us in this global race.

The Challenge of Informing the Info-poor

Even today, creating information rich Indian society, spread out in rural and semi-urban regions of the country, is indeed a challenge to our collective wisdom. It is a challenge especially since these deprived people are not conscious of their deprivation. The rural population in Bharat is predominantly illiterate but it is also generally not bothered about being so. As adults they earn their livelihood, raise the families and locally acquire enough cultural and social education to endure their poverty and not miss being uninformed. Generally they show little enthusiasm to learn and forge ahead in life. Their information database is restricted to what comes from the family, the religious discourses, programs on All India Radio and Doordarshan via community television sets and the hearsay from local social, cultural and political leaders. Unfortunately the local leadership itself, in spite of being street smart, is also poorly equipped in their knowledge base. Rural Praja has learnt to live with their poverty and deprivation. They tolerate poor quality of public services, endure injustice and bureaucratic high-handedness and paradoxically are brought up through religious training that helps them to be happy even in their appalling surroundings. Slow pace of development doesn't agitate them since they do not know what they deserve. Thus they don't recognize that the lack of information is hurting the quality of their work, their productivity, their efficiency, their earning power, their employment and their personal and community health.

The surest, the quickest and the most economical way to get over this serious inadequacy is to use the existing IT tools more aggressively and innovatively to reach them and get them to learn the desired life skills that would enrich them in every way while retaining their environmentally friendly life-style. Since the target group is unaware or reluctant, the best marketing skills have to be used like those used by the businesses for selling the consumer goods. If America can use the media to sell the their lifestyle, why not we to create our own informed society by providing the right inputs?

The process of informing the illiterate rural masses, therefore, involves innovatively creating the audio, video and multimedia software and the databases in local languages and also develops technologies that enable easy access to the delivered information even for the unskilled and the illiterate. Further, it is essential to attractively package the right information using our best creative talents and deliver it via talented communicators who can attract and enthuse the rural adults to tune in the Radio or select the Television Channels delivering such programs. We also need to ensure that we deploy communicators instead of teachers.

Why Radio and Television ?

The computers and the Internet has mesmerized the world around us. No doubt, these two form the most important tools for the information dissemination. But there are several reasons why the Radio and Television, if used more imaginatively, are far more appropriate, cost effective and widely available IT tools for the task on hand, especially for the multilingual and predominantly illiterate country like ours. Let us list these.
1. No skills, including the literacy, are necessary while learning.
2. No new investments are necessary, essential infrastructure exists.
3. Extremely powerful and field proven for audio-visual communication.
4. Local language talents for developing the software are available in plenty.
5. Delivery channels and field maintenance infrastructure is well established.
6. More suitable for creating mass awareness and learning of occupational skills.
7. Ideal for the functional local language literacy campaign amongst masses.
8. Commercially viable since it is easy to get sponsorship and advertising support.

Taking computers, information kiosks and Internet to non-urban areas for community use can follow later on, as the knowledge levels grow over a period of time and the prices of these goodies drop, technology matures and the support infrastructure reaches even the hinterlands.

One should not forget that the green revolution in the sixties would not have succeeded without the Radio, without Aamchi Maati, Aamchi Manse and similar evening broadcasts addressing our farmers in their own languages. Nor would there have been a change in political fortunes of some without Ramayan, Mahabharat and Chanakya telecast on Doordarshan during the 80s.

Resource Mobilization - Commercial Viability

Broadcast Radio and Television scene has undergone a dramatic change during the decade. The single channel monopoly has ended. Available Airtime has increased enormously and since there is more supply than demand, its cost has dropped to a very large extent. Satellite and related technologies like data compression has helped to reduce costs further. This has made it possible to cost effectively manage Television Channels catering to special interest groups.

Secondly reduced costs of broadcasting have correspondingly reduced channel's dependence on broad-based advertising addressing the masses. Advertisers today support programs that attract the target viewership they are interested in. For instance, businesses making products for household interiors will want to advertise program created to impart related skills since the viewers are their potential customers. Every craftsman and tradesman uses commercial products and tools such as paints, wood, laminates, glues, hardware, fasteners, electrical and plumbing accessories etc. So someone was to start a specialty channel called 'Skills', it can be a commercially viable preposition. Such a channel will help us as a country in developing good work culture and improve the quality of workmanship of our craftsmen. It would be the most effective way to educate even the semiliterate artisans, upgrading their skills, improving the work culture and attitudes. It would add to their self-esteem. Interestingly, for this to be achieved, lack literacy is indeed no barrier to their learning.

Look at the industries making products used by plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters, auto mechanics, technicians repairing home appliances, tailors or those employed in service industries like salesmen, waiters in restaurants, clerks, telephone operators and even construction workers or street-side vendors. Such industries would want to sponsor and even give expert inputs to train the actual users of their products. Sponsoring such programs promises them better utilization of their products, better end user service and brand building amongst their 'real' clients.

We often wonder why Indians are such poor performers in competitive sports and rarely involved in pursuing participative adventures one encounters even in China. Our interest in sports or fine arts ends up in being the ringside viewers. Won't the art material manufacturers benefit if they teach using water colours, oil paints or textile paints through an audio-visual guidance on a television channel? As a manufacturer of mountain climbing accessories wouldn't one be interested not in just sponsoring but also help developing such skills?

There are opportunities even in formal education in form of serialized skill development programs in a focused segment.

Television Diploma in Office Work

Let us take just one example where our failure in performance hurts our productivity, our reputation and our image as efficient and responsive offices. This primarily happens due to the lack of formal training of our workforce in offices. There are no courses to formally train even the graduates in office work. Everyone ends up learning the desired skills by the trial and error. Isn't it possible for a television channel to start a diploma course in Office Work? May be a two hundred episode audio-visual training package that prepares the viewer to learn the essential skills to become efficient and well behaved office assistant? One needs to learn the skills like receiving or making phone calls, learn about operation and maintenance of office appliances like the fax machines, paper copiers, calculators, familiarize with office procedures like filing systems, cultivate the right ways to deal with visitors, colleagues, superiors. One also needs to learn about proper attire on the job, dressing for an occasion, write appropriate letters, memos etc. A TV Channel Diploma in Office Work will be a winner since it has a value. If one is seeking a job, won't the prospective employers recognize such a TV Diploma even if its from a TV Broadcaster? Besides developing our human resource, such course will put a feather in the cap of the channel that does it. It is a social service. Interesting part is that this exercise will be commercially very rewarding. It could be more profitable than many stupid serials that do more harm than good.

Orientation course, on a similar line, could be developed for the young girls in their teens and prepare them to conduct their lives safely and productively. Our womenfolk has to be prepared to ensure that they are not exploited and ill treated like they are today and equip them with right information to turn even the illiterate amongst them into bold and efficient family managers. It would be a sort of a finishing course but without foolishly and blindly pushing them to take to western culture. Do we not have enough 'phony pretenders' in south Mumbai, south Delhi and south Kolkata?

Two Quick Steps to promotion of literacy via Television

Entire knowledge one needs to conduct oneself efficiently and safely is all stored in written text. Any form of formal or self-learning therefore needs reading and writing skills. Lack of it hurts the learning capability and therefore the progress, the productivity, the efficiency and self-care of an individual. Literacy is a vital skill for personal advancement in life. Every adult, including those without the literacy skill, understands one's mother tongue as a spoken language. So the reading written text involves knowing the symbols constituting the alphabets - the shapes of the sounds!

Step one is learning alphabets, which essentially is knowing the pictures or shapes of the basic sounds that constitutes a language. DevNagari is the script of phonetic languages like Marathi & Hindi. In short, the spoken and written word in these languages is exactly alike. Devnagari Script has 40 main alphabets of which 28 are the most used consonants and 12 are vowels. Each alphabet is indeed a shape of a sound. Every word in Devnagari is spoken by combining the sounds of all alphabets used in a word. Marathi and Hindi languages are basically phonetic. Unlike English, therefore, meaning of a word in these languages rarely needs the knowledge of the context in which it is used. Therefore if the illiterate are helped by innovatively using the audio-visual medium like the television to correlate and memorize the shapes of the sounds of 40 alphabets, they can read Aksharas used in the written text. Reiterative format will help learning. This would be their first step towards functional literacy.

Achieving the basic literacy on a mass scale, covering entire Marathi or Hindi population is therefore as simple as helping masses to memorize these 40 shapes of sounds and they will get basically equipped to read simple text by correlating the shapes of alphabets constituting simple words. Television will allow us to easily use the reiterative format necessary to imbibe this in the viewer's mind. Advertisers of soaps and face-creams have refined that art. They would then be ready for more formal learning to understand word and sentence formation etc.

The Proposal therefore is to help the illiterates in the community to learn and memorize the shapes of these 40 alphabets and correlate them with their sounds. Fix just these 40 shapes of the alphabets with their sounds in everyone's mind and such person can acquire the basic literary skill.

Media companies can use the creative media talents to produce 10 or 20-Second Spots, one for each alphabet. These should be like the advertisement spots shown during the popular programs on various Television Channels to sell merchandise. Creative media brains that create spots to effectively sell soaps could be assigned the task to imbibe in the minds of the viewer's shapes of characters representing sounds of these 28 consonants and 12 vowels that constitute Marathi and Hindi written text.

These 'AKSHARA' spots should be regularly and repeatedly telecast, strategically intermingled with popular television programs on television channels, especially the religious discourses, mythological serials and other programs that attract illiterate viewers.
Step two would be to start formal literacy classes on the Television that will be conducted by personalities like Madhuri Dixit or Nana Patekar or someone who would attract a large number of illiterate adults to the television screen. We should turn this into a movement by encouraging local literacy clubs to be formed at rural and urban level by local volunteers. They would use these telecasts to gather local population for watching and offer local help and guidance.