Recasting India (24 page)

Anywhere between 30 and 50 people call in and record messages, and make it, says Choudhary, the biggest “oral newspaper” for tribals in India. Tribals or people who trace their ancestry to indigenous tribes in India—a bit like the Native Americans—make up a little more than 8 percent of India's 1.2 billion people.

In recent years they have been at war with the Indian state led by Maoist guerillas fighting armed forces of the state including paratroopers. Essentially this is a guerrilla war that is being fought by tribal rebels led by commanders who belong to various Communist and quasi-Communist networks and parties against government paramilitary forces. According to India's Ministry of Home Affairs, nearly 8,500 people were killed in this war between 2003 and 2012.

Choudhary, who grew up in Central India, says he decided to start CGnet Swara in 2003 while researching a book on the Maoist insurgency called
Let's Call Him Vasu: With the Maoists in Chhattisgarh.
He met many young tribals, or “Adivasis,” as they are often called, who told him that the violence was largely due to “a communication gap.” This is a mild phrase for what is actually a deep and often absolutely bitter disconnect between the world of the Indian tribals and the rest of India, where tribal issues rarely if ever get noticed, unless the news is about tribal guerillas revolting against the state. The tribals of India have hardly any representation in mainstream media.

“The war is a misunderstanding, and behind that misunderstanding is millions of people who just do not have a voice,” says Choudhary. “There are people who don't want to be interpreted and re-interpreted by Delhi or Mumbai [Bombay], they want to tell their own stories, on their own terms.”

One look at his website,
cgnetswara.org
, or the institution's Facebook page gives a fascinating sense of how this happens. There are a series of messages that appear one after the other on the page.

One says:

Another reads:

There is a complaint:

And a solution:

Each message has a name and a phone number attached to it. This serves several purposes. Local CG Swara volunteers in that area can check the veracity of the message. Also, the organization's 12 full-time employees can call and verify the message, especially if it is a complaint. When the message is in a local tribal dialect, which it often is, a local associate of CGnet Swara in the area where the call came from can transcribe and translate the message and then check its accuracy.

At the moment, the service is free for callers. The network gets two kinds of messages—one from citizen journalists, who have contributed to it in the past, and the other from those who are new to the system. Many citizen journalists who have contributed to CGnet Swara in the past have their messages immediately “filed” and available for hearing; for others, a process of verification, sometimes by a local citizen journalist, is followed. Also, if the complaint is about a government official, the complainant is asked to add the name and phone number of the person against whom the complaint is being made so that CGnet Swara employees can call and check on the situation from the perspective of the official. “We are building a network of reliable informants who can deliver real-time voice-based information,” says 44-year-old Choudhary.

One look at the kind of messages CG Swara gets, and anyone who knows India and Indian media knows that these places, these names, almost never figure in the tales this country tells the world about itself, and the ones it repeats to itself. This is a different India speaking to itself and resolving its problems.

Choudhary's work fascinated me because it goes to the heart of the country's democratic debate—what kind of democracy do we really want to be? It goes back to that fundamental question we addressed in the introduction to this book—what kind of democracy does India really need? Measured or experience? Choudhary's bet, like mine, is that India now needs to metamorphose into an experienced democracy. At the heart of his project lies this dream—making democracy an everyday experience of complaint, feedback, redress, and conversation. When I spoke to Choudhary, I realized we both believed that the act of conversation lies at the heart of democracy—and that is what makes his project critical. It allows daily conversation. How did the technology part come to the organization? It came via Bill Thies, a software expert who works at Microsoft's India office in Bangalore and happened to meet Choudhary. Thies, a PhD student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) joined hands with Choudhary to create a platform that could be used to connect disparate voices from the tribal belt. “We were clear on what we wanted—we wanted a simple system that anyone can use, which does not require a lot of education or literacy skills to use. And we wanted a system that could absorb and disseminate information effortlessly and that's what we built,” says Choudhary.

What they thought of was this—how can a system be built where tribals could talk about all the things most important to them? Where can they talk to each other about their cow, their chili, their rice? “We began by being Google for the poor—as in people came to us mainly to listen and get information. Now we are transforming also into the Facebook for the poor via voice,” says Choudhary, whose project had earlier won a UN Democracy Fund award.

Present radio laws in India do not allow CGnet Swara to be on the medium that is their natural ground. Commercial radio licenses are too expensive and community radio has too short a radius—often barely ten kilometers (about 6.2 miles). “For this 10 km license, you need to take 22 permissions. It is bizarre,” says Choudhary. Without a license, there is a citizen band at 26.9 MHz to 27.2 MHz that the law allows people to use, but the receiver is still way too expensive for tribal areas. The cheapest receiver that can catch this band costs about Rs 5,000. Efforts are underway to make different kinds of models to make low-cost servers, including using the Raspberry Pi, the pirate radio transmitter. The dream is to run localized radio stations that would have infinite depth in local information using an army of citizen journalists, most of them trained by Choudhary.

Until then, CGnet Swara is experimenting with various formats—like the song programming they did in 2013 called Sangeet Swara where anyone could dial in and sing a song and anyone could listen to it. Nearly 100,000 people tuned in.

But for all the attention, Choudhary is often on the radar of government agencies, which have frequently searched his premises, suspecting Maoist misuse of his network. It doesn't help that Lingaram Kodopi, the activist nephew of Soni Sori—who was accused of being a Maoist rebel and tortured in Chhattisgarh (activists have called it a gross violation of human rights)—was trained in citizen journalism by Choudhary. As Sori's case led to global headlines as an example of human rights violations in the fight against Maoists, Kodopi too attracted a lot of scrutiny with his activities, many of which, as a citizen journalist, led back to Choudhary. Kodopi is the first trained tribal journalist from the region.

“Sometimes the government suspects us, sometimes the Maoists do—but neither has ever found anything amiss with us. We genuinely want to be the independent media bridge—otherwise this war will never stop. We will never stop until forced to stop.”

Until then, there are some interesting business plans. For instance, Swasthya Swara, a voice-based platform where anyone can discuss herbal medicines or cures and anyone can listen in and access the medication. “We can even stock such pure organic medicines and supply them to anyone who wants them. It will be a completely novel model.”

T
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S THE SORT OF OUT
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BOX THINKING THAT BROUGHT ABOUT
DesiCrew, which was India's pioneering rural BPO when it started in 2005 and the first one begun from scratch as a start-up by a woman entrepreneur.

Saloni Malhotra, a 23-year-old engineer, heard a lecture in Delhi, given by Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the department of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in the southern Indian city of Chennai, that spoke about taking technology to the masses. And so she did. In 2005, she started DesiCrew in Chennai, incubated under the entrepreneurship program at IIT-Madras, which was run by Jhunjhunwala; she built a company of 600 employees across two Indian states with angel funding from a top-ranking former executive of Infosys, one of India's best-known information technology firms.

DesiCrew started operations as a commercial organization in 2007, offering services in project and content management, digitization, mail-room services, secondary research and transcription, website monitoring, localization of web products and beta testing.

While current venture capital funding does not allow the company to reveal exact numbers, DesiCrew has grown by 50 percent in the past year alone. The idea was to see if the kind of outsourcing work that kick-started an Infosys could be done away from the major cities of India, taking that kind of work to the villages and providing employment there.

“We always said let us take jobs to where people are rather than bring people to jobs. We only wanted to create opportunities for the folks who want a white collar job in their geographies. Why can we not provide the kind of training for basic backend work like data entry, for instance at a small town or village level?” says Malhotra, who opened one center in the village of Kollumagudi, about a six-hour drive from Chennai. The beautiful colonial-style bungalow cost DesiCrew a fraction of what the company would have paid as rent in any city. The company also discovered that while the crop of local employees that they could hire often lacked the external finesse and soft skills that a city hire might have, in the long run the rural employees often turned out to be more stable and loyal.

One of the strategies that the company applied was to first start BPO voice operations in regional languages before diversifying into English. The current CEO, J. K. Manivannan, says his pitch is always that DesiCrew is the place where students from a rural background get a chance to pick up invaluable soft skills.

“There have been many instances where people have spent a couple of years with us and have then moved on to larger BPOs in cities but equally there have been instances when the candidate has tried to make the leap too swiftly and having failed to adjust in a larger pond has come back to us,” says Manivannan. He says one of the biggest drives for new employees is to soak up the English language. “In fact, we did not venture into voice mainly because we wanted processes that can be replicated for an international market. For example, a policy issuance for a domestic insurance company can be replicated for an international health-care/insurance company. The focus on English is because in addition to the linguistic skill, in Indian context, more accentuated in the rural areas—knowing English is also a proxy for confidence, self-belief, and worldly exposure. A rural BPO needs to be seen in the context of reinvention of the public skills of the employee.” In fact even the term “rural BPO” is hardly ever used these days. To emphasize that the quality provided is on a par with any urban center, the term used is “Impact Sourcing Service Provider.”