Hostile online campaign takes some of the shine off Vedanta's promotionals.
An advertisement flooding airwaves across the country would have you believe that a company called Vedanta is a creating a product called happiness. A young child called “Binno” plays, studies, and thinks big dreams in one of India's lusher and more idyllic villages. Binno's joy, the voice-over says, is relatively recent: Binno's parents probably didn't have as much fun or as many dreams as Binno does.
Binno's parents don't dispute the claims, but it is safe to assume that they certainly didn't have ad-firm Ogilvy and Mather on hand to film their childhood as part of the first national campaign to signal the entry of controversial mining and metals giant Vedanta into the happiness market.
London-based Vedanta Resources is the holding company for a host of Indian and international companies like BALCO, Vedanta Aluminum, Sterlite, Sesa Goa, and Cairn India Ltd with annual revenues in excess of $11 billion. The company's rapid expansion has attracted the ire of environmental activists and human rights groups like Amnesty International who have accused the company of exploiting indigenous communities — such as the Dongria Kondhs of Niyamgiri in Odisha — without due process.
The company is also involved in litigation over a proposed university in Odisha, and a separate case in Chhattisgarh in which 45 labourers were killed in a construction accident in their BALCO plant in Korba. Company spokespersons have denied such allegations and say that the company has improved the lives of thousands of individuals through employment and social initiatives implemented by the Vedanta Foundation.
Telling its side of the story
Vedanta's “Creating Happiness” campaign, according to company spokesperson Senjam Raj Sekhar, is part of an “initiative to tell our side of the story”; yet the hostile reception on blogs and social-media networks like Facebook and Twitter highlights the risks of exposing a tightly controlled corporate message to the anarchy of the internet.
Case in point: The television commercial starring Binno is merely the launch pad of the campaign, which also includes a film competition, in which media and mass communication students from 21 institutions across the country were invited to make three-minute films on the company's various Corporate Social Responsibilty projects. An online campaign appears to have influenced film director Shyam Benegal and film artiste Gul Panag's decision to withdraw from the competition jury.
Activists have even started a viral “Faking Happiness” campaign in an attempt to highlight Vedanta's alleged malpractices.
In conversations with The Hindu, Ms Panag described her decision to withdraw as a “matter of personal choice …when I found myself in a position other than what I thought I had committed to,” but appeared more outspoken on Twitter, tweeting “My bad. Just got full details. I wasn't aware that the competition was past of #vedanta glorification/PR Have pulled out [sic].”
“Initially I said yes and then it struck me that I hadn't thought of it as Vedanta, just as a short films competition,” said Mr. Benegal in an interview, adding that “They are very nice films,” but he withdrew “the moment I saw this was the kind of thing they were asking us to judge.”
With Mr. Benegal and Ms Panag's withdrawal, only O&M's Piyush Pandey — the maker of the Binno ad — is left of the original three-member jury. Vedanta refuses to reveal their replacements.
Vedanta representatives describe the competition as an example of “social media in the true sense,” where students were assigned community initiatives on the basis of their geographic proximity to Vedanta projects, and asked to engage with the communities they covered. Mr. Sekhar, the Vedanta spokesperson, said that company representatives made presentations to each student group and discussed a broad range of issues.
“We told them do not make a corporate film,” Mr. Sekhar said, “find the story of either an individual or a family or the entire village or the community whose lives have changed…so it's not about the programme but about individuals.”
The films themselves are student productions showcasing a variety of CSR initiatives such as hospitals, football academies, company run schools, rural entrepreneurs and anganvadis. Yet, none of the films explore themes such as ecological damage or the impact of mining on forest communities. The sole film to address the issue of rehabilitating project-affected individuals describes Vedanta as a “path-breaking leader of social upwardness [sic]” that has rescued “the lives of tribals from the darkness of backwardness.”
While there is no reason to doubt Vedanta's claims that students were free to pick their own unique perspectives for their films, the structure of the competition could have influenced the kind of films that were made. According to the website, Vedanta provided all the travel, logistics and accommodation for the students, a local Vedanta team was present during each shoot, and students were not allowed to upload or share their work before the films were first uploaded by Vedanta on its official YouTube channel. Students were disallowed from using any stock footage for their projects, which would have made it impossible to incorporate news reports or footage shot by activists.
Vedanta representatives said they were happy with the campaign, claiming that it has attracted more than one lakh views on YouTube and that the company is fielding calls from individuals interested in working with the Vedanta Foundation. Yet, the campaign could fall victim to the network virality that it hopes to harness. While few expect companies to spend money on producing balanced, unbiased and fair advertising campaigns, viewers expect “film competitions” that feature “real people” in “real situations” to adhere to certain broadly defined standards of neutrality. At present, one suspects that the winning entry shall be the one that shows Vedanta in the best light.
aman.sethi@thehindu.co.in
priscilla@thehindu.co.in
Keywords: Vedanta ad, Vedanta creating happiness, Vedanta campaign, Vedanta short film contest, environmental violation, tribal rights, Dongria Kondhs, Odisha mining, corporate social responsibility, social networking, social media campaign
@swetha Your argument is laughable. There are reams and reams of studies (not
funded by any corporate or "foreign agency") that show that nowhere in the world
does the local community's lot improve when they are displaced from their
traditional lands. Not one place. Please go look at EPW's archives as a starting point.
In fact, your comment makes one suspect that Vedanta pays you to make these
"vague" comments on a well-researched article that makes a very important point.
The smear campaigns against Vedanta's 'Happiness' effusing promotional highlight the ineptness of advertising when a company gives the impression of giving the short shrift to integrity and morals. In Advertising,a company dispenses information that makes it project itself in a favorable light to all its constituencies. Notwithstanding the negative press which Vedanta has garnered, it is the company representatives who must go all out in lending a touch of credibility to such promotions by facilitating better transparency in communication.
It brings to light the debate of economic development at the behest of the environment and the society at large, which is the root cause of the present contempt the company is faced with. The only solution to this imbroglio would be for the company to have the will and show demonstrated action to tackle concerns of both the environmental decadence and the exploitation of the tribals through communication that is open, convincing and not lop-sided.
@Swetha : we don't need corporates to take care of tribals (and their land). The tribals have lived on these lands for centuries. It is obvious that Vedanta is out to mint money (otherwise why would any corporate entity bother making all these propaganda-style ads?). Nobody is passing "vague" comments here. It is a well-known facts that we are talking about.
Please look at why NGOs like Amnesty and Survival have not protested against French MNC Lafarge who are mining limestone in the sacred forest of Khasi tribe in Meghalaya, despite local protests or against Australian mining giant Rio Tinto who are looking at mining in the tribal areas of Keonjhar and Sundergarh in Orissa?
How many of you making comments here know the ground reality in
Niyamgiri? It is easy to be fooled by websites/ NGOs which would pass
denegrading comments without backing any of its comments. Try
unearthing the funding source of each of the NGOs which have voiced
their protest/ have commented against Vedanta's work in Niyamgiri. You
would find a corporate which would otherwise have benefitted if
Vedanta had not been there/ one which would lose its profitability
because of Vedanta selling aluminium at lower cost from Niyamgiri
bauxite.
Have you even tried talking to any of the tribals and seen what value
addition Vedanta has brought to their lives? Better think for once and
do some research rather than passing these vague comments
It shows that you can, virtually, buy anything and everything. That the vulnerability of the public to be misled by intelligently and skillfully made/ edited visual messages and the poor moral standards of those who can make those messages are disturbing. Many of our Journalism and Media institutes are not concerned to make the students aware of the importance to keep certain values and ethics in their career (as well as in life) once they become part of the 'industry'. Media Students, of course as part of the training itself, should be advised by the faculty what 'competition' they can participate in and what they should not.
Piyush Pandey will obviously stay on the corporate film panel because Vedanta must be one of O&Ms high paying clients. O&M just creates social awareness ads to win awards. If they were really thinking of social responsibility they wouldn't have agreed to do this ad. O&M just try showing your ad to the people of Niyamgiri, who have been stripped off their livelihood thanks to Vedanta. You'll are sure to get the axe.
Another insidious aspect of this deviously clever Vedanta campaign and its "social responsibilities" is that it implies that entitlements like right to education, to livelihood, better healthcare are best left to corporates rather than government. Binno's right to education and happiness is the prime duty of the state. Certainly not corporates that have ulterior motives. We need rights-based approach to development where people are empowered to demand their rights and not where corporates patronisingly dish out promises of happiness.
Ogilvy's choice as Vedanta as a client flies in the face of the WPP code of business conduct which includes these commitments : "We will not undertake work which is intended or designed to mislead,including in relation to social, environmental and human rights issues; We will consider the potential for clients or work to damage the Group's reputation prior to taking them on. This includes reputational damage from association with clients that participate in activities that contribute to the abuse of human rights" It will be interesting to see how WPP reports their work for Vedanta while reporting their next Corporate Responsibility Report!
The funny thing is, I think everyone who watched the ad could see through the pesude-saccharine "lifestyle improvement" propagated by the firm. A great ad by a top advertising company is not going to hide the blood (not pseudo) upon Vedanta's hands.
Thumbs down Vedanta (and strangely, Ogilvy and Mather too!)
As a film-maker myself I fail to understand why a healthy competition between young, aspiring and creative students should suffer in the midst of controversies surrounding an MNC. Secondly, how many of us stopped smoking at the first sight of films depicting the harmful effects of smoking as habit? Hasn't an Indian gone on to own now the very company which was instrumental in bringing the first footprints of British Colonialism into India? Shame we still choose to bury our heads in the sand and believe the threat is over.
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