Bhubaneshwar, Orissa 
December 22-23, 2004

Twenty-five per cent of India’s work force is unemployed – and most of these jobless are in our rural areas.

Manoj Pattnaik of RCDC, Bhubaneswar, addressing the participants on the first day of the workshop

Between 1993-94 and 1999-2000, India’s employment growth fell from 2.7 per cent to 1.07 per cent per annum, despite the GDP having grown from 5.2 per cent to 6.7 per cent.

Why has this economic growth not resulted in employment generation? There is a virtual drying up of all the conventional sources of employment. Jobs in the agriculture and organised sectors are at a premium, and the government’s gargantuan employment generation programmes have not lived up to their promise.

There is a clear need to look beyond growth-induced employment generation – towards rural-based, non-organised sectors such as forestry and related activities. Land and forests form the two basic renewable sources of livelihood. With the right policy initiatives and resource allocation for raising their productivity, they can generate and ensure livelihood for the 57 million rural households in India.

This is an issue that demands urgent understanding, reportage and public debate. To discuss and demystify the issues with the media and help them to report better CSE and Sambhalpur based Manav Adhikar Seva Samiti (MASS) organized a one-and-half day workshop in Bhubaneshwar (Orissa) from December 22-23, 2004. The workshop gathered together policy experts, researchers, grassroots activists and mediapersons to explain the key topical areas. The discussions encouraged greater understanding of the issue and reporting on it with more clarity.

Of the 23 shortlisted participants, about 21 participated in the event. Senior journalists and reporters from The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), NDTV, The New Indian Express, Asian Age, Dharitri (Oriya), Vaartha (Telugu), Hitavada (Hindi) and Prabhat Khabar (Hindi) were present; so were a number of freelancers contributing to publications and agencies such as Samaj (Oriya), Sambad (Oriya), The Statesman, Tehelka and the Women’s Feature Service.

The workshop agenda was divided clearly into the two days: the first day was devoted to across the table discussions on various aspects of the issue, which began with short introductions from Souparno Banerjee, Coordinator, Media Resource Centre, CSE and Ranjan Panda, was broken down into three broad sections:

• The crisis, which enumerated the entire issue of ecological poverty and the erosion of sustainable livelihoods – focusing at length on the causes, the nature and the proportion, the statistics etc. Richard Mahapatra, then Coordinator of the Poverty and Environment unit of CSE spoke on this issue.
• The opportunities, which looked at the immense potential that lay in tapping forest-based resources and activities for generating employment. Richard and Manoj Pattnaik, Head, Forests and Governance, RCDC, Bhubaneshwar, were the speakers. Manoj gave a good presentation on the market values and economics of trade in various forest products in the four states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and AP with live examples to help journalists in better understanding of the issue.
• The challenges for the media, an interactive session in which the participants shared their experiences in development writing and debated on how to meet the challenge of low coverage of development issues. While every speaker was ruing the problem of finding space in newspapers on issues of development, S S Nanda, Sambalpur Bureau Chief of the Oriya daily Dharitri, had the solution: while s/he is reporting his usual and accepted beats and stories, the journalist must, he said, be ready to beat the system by finding ways and means of reporting on such issues whenever s/he can, through whichever medium s/he can. This was corroborated by NDTV correspondent Purushottam Thakur, who told me that he tries to do such stories whenever possible, while he is in the field covering more popular issues.

The following day, a site visit was organised to the village of Magarbandh (Sulia forests) in Nayagarh, about 150 kms from Bhubaneshwar. The purpose of the visit was to give the participants a first-person feel and look at a community that has revived its forests and is now thriving on forest-based activities. Led by the locally-based Jungle Surakshya Samiti, 750 villages in the district have taken over control of their forests, regenerated them extensively, are managing them and are successfully using them for their sustenance. The workshop participants were given an introductory presentation (in Oriya, which was translated by Richard and others) by members of the Samiti, after which members of the village committee spoke to them.

The site visit was crucial for journalists to see things in perspective and relate to what was being talked about the day before. Some published stories on the site visit. A month after the workshop Zee News and NDTV correspondents went back to village Magarbandh and did stories on the forest communities there. Besides the workshop and the report by Richard was discussed in the Chhattisgarh Assembly, following which Richard was asked to address the Assembly.