Gaon Connection is India’s first comprehensive rural media platform whose work spans across print, video, digital, training, and ground activation. At the heart of its work is a massive outreach program that is in the process of creating thousands of community journalists -- women, farmers, and students -- trained to become the voices of their community. In its digital avatar, Gaon Connection showcases inspiring stories from rural areas including from Self-Help Groups and other communities, helps highlight rural issues and gets citizens’ governance-related problems fixed on the ground; and takes to villages useful information that doesn’t reach them, despite a huge hunger for knowledge and information in the rural heartland. We want to look at rural India as a real place, not as a stereotype as mainstream media does. We want to stick to the principles of well-intentioned, old-fashioned journalism even as we ride the massive scale of the digital revolution, and to be able to change real lives, not just do armchair activism. Our vision is to work across states and languages, creating a “connection” between urban-rural and rural-rural India, the like of which has never been seen before. We want to redefine the mainstream.
“In an era where India’s media industry concentrates on the urban concerns, Gaon Connection strives to give rural citizens a voice of their own,” says Neelesh Misra, Founder of Gaon Connection.
