Development dialogue

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Charkha plans a development- dialogue about regional developmental issues once in every month with the journalist. The main objective of the dialogue is to establish the communication among journalists, social workers and general mass to highlight developmental issues and efforts.

More than thousand newspapers and journal are published in Gujarat including daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly and quarterly journals. In these newspapers, news related to politics, crime, games, films etc. are covered mainly. Especially these types of news and advertisements are published in large numbers in mainstream papers. To find out articles about developmental efforts in the newspapers are very difficult. If sometime these news get some place in the newspapers, then either it is in very less space or sometimes only because to fill the empty space of the paper.

Charkha has decided to change this situation. With the efforts of charkha for last ten years, developmental efforts are getting quite good place in mainstream newspapers. Charkha has been providing regular information to the representatives of group of media, so they can write about developmental issues and provide place in the main stream. Charkha organizes a developmental dialogue for journalist to provide regular information on works of different developmental issues.

This discourse has started since 1999. By organizing it for years, it has come out that development practitioners of voluntary organizations of Gujarat are in regular contacts with each other through different programmes. But the contact between workers and journalists is very less. As a result, present developmental issues do not come in limelight. In general, there is facility of ‘press club’ in different states of our country for gathering of journalists at one place. But Gujarat does not have any body like press club.

Especially there is lack of a place to provide information about development issues. Considering all these points and for keeping regularity a developmental dialogue is planned every month with fixed date and place since July 2004. For last five years, Charkha is organizing developmental dialogue every month. More than 50 developmental dialogue organized with different issues till now. Subject experts, experienced workers and villagers participated in the dialogue and explored issues related to state and region.

During the dialogue journalists are provided with full information related to developmental issues. It was suggested to journalists that it is not a press briefing, it is a platform for informal dialogue regarding developmental issues. All the mainstream newspapers have given place to developmental issues as a follow-up of dialogue. Charkha has more than 136 newspaper cuttings including 20 daily and 7 weekly journals.

Journalists of electronic media also narrated a story and telecasted it on regional as well as state level. Dialogue has changed the traditional mentality of journalists and play important role to make them understand and sensitized towards development works. The contacts between social workers and journalists has increased and also established strong relationship. More than 200 journalists participated in dialogue till now.