e-News & Media, Winner 2012
Chai with Lakshmi was started in 2011, claimed to be a meaningful online talk show that connects the average Indian internet user with projects and people who are impacting the quality of urban lives and the future of the nation. Through webisodes that are 7 to 11 minutes long,the show carries forward stories that are inspiring, informative, current and real. The viewers are spread across the globe. The content is available across platforms and intents to change the way India sees itself and how India is seen.The initiative aims at bringing across that India is much more than the political challenges it is facing, more than the trials the average middle class Indian faces on a day to day basis and much more than caste and religious divides. The shows aim to be light hearted and entertaining. The program avoids preaching and instead tries to encourage in every single webisode. The viewer should be left thinking positive.The show aims to share inspiring examples relevant to contemporary India and tries to inspire fellow citizens on how they can participate constructively to influence India’s future positively.
The goal of the initiative, started in 2011, is to create a network of rural visual journalists who will produce and bring to the attention of the world, stories on bad governance, human right violations and other related issues. The Rural Visual Journalism Network creates multimedia stories on development, human rights, good governance and democracy from rural Bangladesh which will generate employment for district correspondents. The aim is to build a network of professional photographers, NGO workers and citizen journalists who will be trained and equipped to produce multimedia (photography, video, text) stories from 64 rural districts with the goal to cover100% of Bangladesh. The content produced by the network will be directed by the DrikNEWS website while the goal is also to work with Drik’s banglarights.net website to harmonize the campaigns and projects directed by other NGOs and build an archive of reports on issues of rural human rights, good governance and democracy. Banglarights, a web portal specialized on human rights, will publish the content on their own website as well as work with Drik to use other means of community distribution methodologies such as exhibitions, social networks and mobile networks to achieve the maximum impact.
The program was established in 2006 and presents an integrated internet portal, which provides news updates, sports news,travel and lifestyle content, entertainment, videos and many other topics in multiple Indian languages. The long-term vision is to reach hundreds of millions of Indians worldwide with relevant and meaningful content. Currently Oneindia has more than 135 million monthly page views and over 2 million monthly unique visitors while 50 million page views happen from the mobile internet site. The mission of oneindia.in is also to reach and serve every online viewer in their own regional language as content provision in local languages has proven to be extremely high in demand among viewers across the board. By 2013, new levels of growth are expected whereby the more ambitious objectives have been set. For example it is planned to add 3 more languages, namely Marathi, Gujarati, Bangala to the portfolio, second the portal will offer 2000 news articles online every day and third more vertical information, including news on travel, education and e-commerce will be added in multiple languages. The further extension of the content aims at reaching more than 21 million monthly visitors and to serve more than 200 million monthly page views.
BartaVubon was started in 2011 and is an Information Hub in Bengali Language while also being the first one to use Social BookmarkingTechnology.The information source of the hub consists of various types of local websites using online newspapers,magazines, wikis, blogs,forums and notes in Bengali Language.The information of BartaVubon is categorized and regularly checked by the administration of the initiative because neither reliability nor authenticity should be compromised. BartaVubon is comfortable with any type of internet enabled devices.The portal consists of different kinds of design dependent on the device capacity of the delivered content. Anyone can visit BartaVubon with any device from any place. The endeavor has two goals, firstly to build an information resource portal in Bengali language to promote local content and secondly to achieve rural development by making it available in villages which are able to use the information hub to build the capacity of the rural population.The model is replicable in other local languages of India as well as in other SouthAsian countries, especially since Social Media and Social Networking has become an important part of daily lives. People of modern India and South Asia have become depended on Social Media for various reasons, including work related Social Communication, access to instant News, the sharing experience or to simply connect with friends and families at all time.