Eight journalists, including three women reporters, have been selected for the 2011 Inclusive Media Fellowships of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). The Inclusive Media Project also conducts media research and runs a unique resource centre, im4change.org, on India’s rural crises. The selected fellows will spend time with rural communities to bring out their issues and anxieties for public and policy intervention.

A fellowship Jury comprising Aniruddha Bahal, Seema Chishti, Nikhil Dey, Urmilesh and Yogendra Yadav selected the media fellows after a meticulous process. The fellowship jury assessed the candidates on the basis of criteria that included the relevance of their project proposals for rural livelihoods, the clarity, depth and innovativeness of the project and story ideas, candidates’ grasp of the subject, writing and analytical skills, among others. The selected candidates and their newspapers are also being notified individually.

Abu Zafar, to write for the IANS, (project on the state of primary education, particularly of the girl child, in the schools and madarsas of Azamgarh district of UP); Anupam Trivedi of Hindustan Times, Dehradun, (Project on distress migration within India and abroad from Uttarakhand Hills); Baba Mayaram of Chhattisgarh Post (Project on high input farming and agrarian distress in Hoshangabad and Harda district of Madhya Pradesh); Panini Anand, to write for Rajashtan Patrika (Project on dalit mass movements for social justice in Baran, Alwar, Seekar, Bhilwara and Barmer districts of Rajasthan); Sangeeta Barua Pisharotty to write for the Hindu (project on loss of livelihoods of the indigenous people of Majuli island in Assam due to shrinking land mass); Purushottam Singh Thakur to write for the Pioneer Bhubaneshwar, (project on the rural crises caused by land acquisition in Bolangir and Sambhalpur regions of Orissa); Nivedita Khandekar to write for HT Delhi (Project on the crises of health and environment related problems of the remote hilly regions of Lohit and Anjaw in Arunachal Pradesh); and Ratna Bharali Talukdar, to write for the Eastern Panorama (Project on the impact of the recent earthquake on human lives and ecology in Sikkim and the indigenous coping mechanisms of the native people)

The Inclusive Media Fellowships are designed to encourage individual media persons to deeply interact with rural communities of this vast country to understand and write about their issues and, in the long-run, specialize on aspects of India’s rural crises. One of the main objectives of the Inclusive Media Project is to increase and sharpen the understanding about rural India’s multiple crises in the mainstream media.