A new, inspiring citizen media project comes from India. We are presenting Seven Sisters Project and our interview with the founder - Shibayan Raha.
Shibayan Raha is an Access Now Tech Innovation Award Winner and the Founder of Seven Sisters Project. Shibayan is a seasoned community organiser and trainer. He started his career with Students for a Free Tibet where he served as the Grassroots Director for India. He has also worked with the global campaigning group Avaaz.org, directing their involvement in the 2011 anti-corruption uprising in India, and then with the world’s largest petition platform Change.org.
And here is all about Seven Sisters Project :
Q: What is The Seven Sisters Project and how it works ?
A: Seven Sisters Project is Northeast India’s first mobile phone-based citizen media project.
“The idea behind the Seven Sister Project is to enable reporters in Northeast India to tell their stories to the world via a deep integration of mobile phone and Facebook. India has over 900 million mobile connections, which gives us an advantage and a ready network to tap into and leverage on the accessibility of the same. The technology would simply combine an Interactive voice response system and Facebook application to create a mobile reporting network for Northeast India, with the aim of spreading news through Facebook to users in different parts of the country. This platform will be deployed in North East India where reach of traditional news media is non-existent to a large extent. While high tech infrastructure remains underdeveloped, the usability of new media platforms such as Facebook are on an all time high. The Seven Sisters Project would not only fill this vacuum but also create a much needed replicable model to reach different parts of North East.”
Q: How it all began - idea, name, realization ?
A: From my teenage days I took up traveling as one of my never ending passions. I used to always travel cheap, stay in dorms and mix with the locals. But there was something which kept me thinking, the general attitude of mainland tourists towards northeast India. At points of my travel I will bump into mainland Indians who like their nosy counterparts will blast me with questions like, why am I traveling alone, if I don’t get bored etc. Same time they will caution me not to go to Northeast India. They will give me varied reasons ranging from Mizos will inject me with HIV blood, Nagas hate Indians and they will spear me. But from the bottom of my heart I knew that all of them were a bunch of hypocrites and nothing else. In 2007 quite accidentally I relocated to Delhi. Here I encountered a very different situation. Like any other metros Delhi has a huge number of youths from the Northeast. Most study, then work in the service industry and send money back home. I saw them facing racist jibes from other Indians which include being called chinki, dog eaters to the extent of sexual violence.
At this point of time I started meeting quite a few people from Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and to my good fortune they are my good friends today. Over the years during our chats I realized that there is a big vacuum between the two sides of this nation. If the central government didn’t want to develop Northeast even after 1962 war with China merely out of concern that China will use the infrastructure to occupy Northeast permanently, then mainland Indians have also largely ignored this region.
In a nutshell what we have now is a bunch of stereotypes floating around. I started thinking what I can do as an individual to overcome this bridge? Whether we can create a medium where indigenous communities staying in Northeast India can tell their stories without being censored? One thing we noticed is the huge progress in mobile phone penetration in Northeast India. (increased from 26% in March 2009 to 47% in September 2010. Source: Sinlung.com). I realized if we can somehow connect people with a platform where they can call a toll free number to record their opinion/stories on issues they care about, then we will be able to at least make an effort to bridge this information gap.
The Name- Northeast India consists of seven states/regions namely Mizoram, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. They have been called as seven sisters states historically and we decided to stick to the frame and name it Seven Sisters Project.
Q: What is your goal ?
A: Our goal is to enable citizens in Northeast India to tell their stories to the world via a deep integration of mobile phone and Facebook. I think mobile phones have a lot of potential, its kind of a non-violent tactical equipment. If people are trained on using it to report stories/opinions on issues they care it will become a one stop shop for news gathering and dissemination.
Q: How do you see Indian media and information system today?
A: Indian media and information system is top down. Corporates and mainstream journalists are feeding the common man whatever they want to. There is complete disconnect on the news/stories that keep happening in the communities and the stories that are played out in the mainstream media.What we need today is a bottom up approach, where news are created and disseminated by the grassroots section of the country or citizen journalists.
Q: In this sense, is there a cooperation between mainstream and citizen media in India ?
A: At this point of time this is still developing. There are few citizen journalists, networks like us etc but cooperation between mainstream and citizen media is not so developed. But our sincere hope in this decade itself we will see a big change happening. The two has to embrace each other.
Q: Can the organization of citizen journalists, their linking through social media networks and creation of new, local citizen media projects really change the structure of the media in your country?
A: Yes we are very hopeful in this matter. I recently came back from a trip to Northeast India where we trained a group of citizen journalists on mobile reporting for the Seven Sisters Project. We saw how everyone is connected to Facebook or in some places how it has become a community thing where people collect news and text to someone who has Facebook on his phone and he/she posts it online. We have to harness this potential, use this to build up the community.
Q: Are social media and blogging communities developed in today India?
A: It is developed but as with the mainstream media it is heavily concentrated in the metros or cities and the grassroots communities have largely being left out. So again what we see is a vacuum of sorts where we are reading, listening and sharing only a set type of news.
Q: The Seven Sisters Project in the future - your plans and expectations.
A: Our dream is big and resources are stretched to the limit. We won a small grant of $5000 from Access Now and thats how the project got started. In the next two years we plan to train at least 100-200 citizen journalists in Northeast India in using the Seven Sisters reporting platform and create/disseminate news in region. We plan to integrate Facebook into our daily news sharing by creating a social reader app quite similar to Guardian and Washington Post.
Second part of our work is to create a safe, censorship free video news portal. We are already working with our friends in the technology field and they have created a app called “Storymaker”. Its a safe android application and it helps citizen journalists create videos, photos and even audios in a anonymous way (if required). To do all this we are looking at crowdfunding and foundation grants.
Q: Your view of citizen journalism in the future ?
A: Arab Spring has shown us that citizen journalism is a no holds barred arena. Anyone, anywhere can be a citizen journalists. This field is breaking barriers and with little push in terms of technology, training citizen journalism will definitely scale up to reach a upstream level.