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Self Help Journalism - a success story by Shree Padre |
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If farm journalism is to be need based and useful, the best way is this: farmers should start expressing through pens. Only those who wear shoes know where it pinches. We have made a humble attempt to translate this objective into implementation. The idea was this: to encourage and train farmers to write, drawing from their field experiences. No theoretical writings. The yardstick for acceptance of an article is that how useful or informative – in that order – is to the farmer and not who has written it. Our association, the All India Arecanut Growers Association, a 50 year old apolitical farmers’ welfare organisation started publishing “Adike Pathrike” in vernacular Kannada language. Since the start many general magazines and dailies reproduce our stories with due credit. Adike Pathrike is for sustainable agriculture. We have had stories on biocontrol, vermicomposting and a series on successful non-chemical farmers, to name but a few. The publication is not a mouth-piece of the association. All the editorial board members are practicing farmers. From writing articles and editing to publishing and even selling farmers play the key role. An experiment which probably has no parallel in our country. Getting farmers to write From the beginning, we believed in the wisdom and knowledge of farmers. There is no dearth of it. We gave this offer: “if you have something worthwhile about farming that you want to communicate with your fellow farmer, feel free to write it. Don’t bother about the style. If there is a content, we will try our best to rewrite and present it, with your cooperation. We wanted to see every new development or new crop or technology or plant varieties, devices, machine etc., from farmers’ viewpoint. We call this kind of journalism “self-help journalism”. We had a hope that once you create a platform for farmers to write, articles would flow like water that flows on gravity. But that was not to be. We had to dig borewells each time to get water. After decades of being taken for granted, farmers are happy to allow others to talk and write on behalf of them. It is like a patient who has fractured one leg. He needs a lot of physiotherapy to teach his legs walking before he can resume walking on his own. Within a few months of starting
the magazine, we realised the futility of pinning our hopes on known staff
journalists, most of them based in cities or towns, who lack a clear understanding
of farming profession and its problems. Even some in rural areas couldn’t
offer new content. Instead of relying on such sources, we thought it better
to give some interested farmers a training of journalism.
In ILEIA Newsletter.
March 1994
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