CGNet Swara: Journalism and governance in rural India

CGNet Swara is a voice based citizen journalism platform, created for the rural and the marginalized people of rural Chhattisgarh. This system enables the callers to record their issues of local interest, as well as listen to other messages recorded by other people. The rural communities usually do not get any attention from the mainstream media and hence the problems of the tribal people remain unsolved. To resolve this problem, Shubhranshu Choudhary started CGNet Swara for helping the tribal people. In 2004, CGNet an online listserv was introduced for people to discuss their problems. As the Internet penetration is low in the rural parts of Chhattisgarh, CGNet Swara was introduced as a voice portal platform which does not need Internet. Since it was launched in 2010, CGNet Swara has received over 575,000 calls, over 6900 published stories and 287 reports of problems that were solved through CGNet Swara. This article examines the Journalism and Governance of CGNet Swara, which has helped rural people. To understand the good work done by CGNet Swara and its team, I will be focusing on three main case studies of local village people to show how CGNet Swara is a success in the rural regions of Chhattisgarh