Villagers do not get their due attention from the media houses even when they are in distress, said P. Sainath, former Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu and winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award.
He was addressing a gathering of students from various universities and colleges across the country during the panel discussion on ‘Journalism on the commons’ in the city on Friday.
Mr. Sainath asked the youngsters to think about leveraging technology and information to address the problems faced by rural poor in India.
Not much focus was given by media houses to the plight of the people from Osmanabad or Marathwada regions during the aftermath of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘notebandhi’ (demonetisation) move. More than 80% ATMs weren’t working in rural areas. In contrast, urban ATMs functioned to the minimum but there were huge queues which was given more coverage by newspapers, he said.
He asked young journalists to come up with more information and articles on rural population and technicians. Earlier, a panel discussion on Future of Information Technology, chaired by Prabir Purkayastha, science activist, was held. Evgeny Morozor, Sameer Soman, and Kiran Chandra, secretary of Free Software Movement of India, spoke.
