By Ammu Joseph, Women's eNews. March 7, 2005
[excerpts]
Ten years after the U.N. recognized that women's participation in media was a critical area of concern, trailblazers in rural India are telling storiesfrom the margins of society.
In 1995 the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action affirmed the importance of media for women's empowerment. In 1997, women from 75 villages in and around Pastapur decided they needed their own media to express themselves, facilitate dialogue across rural communities, document and analyze local events and issues and convey information and ideas to the outside world.
They may not have heard of the Beijing Platform, but they obviously understood its logic. They were convinced that access to and control over media would help them and their communities.
A decade ago, these women faced multiple jeopardy as poor, illiterate, rural women from Dalit communities (former "outcastes") making a meager living from farming in a semi-arid region. They had little access to the media even as viewers and listeners. Nearly 5,000 of them were, however, members of the sanghams, or village-level women's collectives, associated with the Deccan Development Society, a 20-year-old grassroots organization based in Pastapur and Hyderabad that works with socially- and economically-disadvantaged rural communities.
Seven women completed a 10-month video training course created specially for them. They have since gone on to make over 100 films which draw, for subject matter, on their lives and concerns: food, work, social and cultural life.
One of their most significant films, Why Are Warangal Farmers Angry with BT Cotton? exposed the unhappy experiences of farmers in Andhra Pradesh who had experimented with BT cotton – a genetically modified variety promoted by an international conglomerate. Tracking the experiences of half a dozen farmers over the months between planting and harvesting, the women recorded their despair as the crop failed to live up to hyped promises. In a remarkable final sequence, angry farmers swore on film that they would never touch BT again.
In 2001 they established an independent, rural, women's media collective, the DDS Community Media Trust, to help produce and promote their work.
