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It’s a woman’s world for this rural digital media startup

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CIOL Writers
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Chambal Media, a rural digital media start-up, has partnered with Khabar Lahariya— an eight-page newspaper operated by a team of women journalists in the badlands of Bundelkhand since 15 years—to distribute and market its digital content on the same feminist business model.

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“It was started in response to the increasing penetration of the Internet and smartphones in rural Uttar Pradesh, and the lack of good quality, independent digital media available for rural audiences,” said Shalini Joshi, co-founder, and CEO of Khabar Lahariya said.

Chambal Media co-founders—Disha Mullick and Kavita—will follow in the footsteps of the eight-page weekly whose core principle is “Apni Khabar, apni bhasha mein” (your news in your native language).

Since the inception of the newspaper project in 2002, the production and marketing of Khabar Lahariya have been dependent on a cohort of female journalists who are mostly recruited from the rural communities where the newspaper is produced and circulated.

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“Chambal Media aims to enable a local authentic voice of journalism to reach the largest possible audience. We will continue to distribute news generated by women, and especially from marginalised communities like Dalits, Muslims, and adivasis,” Mullick said.

Inspired by the iconic Vice Media, the digital content of Chambal Media has already created ripples in some rural quarters of Bundelkhand. A video feature story about Narad—a young boy from Tindwari in Banda district who made a helicopter from a motorcycle engine, and was arrested by the local police—was watched by over 13,000 viewers on Facebook, in a district with 16,000 people accessing Facebook on 3G internet.

“This is just one of a successful six-month pilot run of video news content, podcasts, and memes which have taken Khabar Lahariya’s local outreach to 50,000 viewers a week,” Mullick said.

Its digital outreach in six months has overtaken the audience who were traditionally being reached out to via print. “And to this audience, we are able to provide stories that another local media is unable to,” Kavita said. In three years, Chambal Media hopes to expand to 80 districts across the Hindi belt.