Im4Change

We, a small team of media persons, researchers and development thinkers, are trying to create a clearing house of information on India marginalized to generate meaningful debates and sharper media coverage. The Inclusive Media for Change started with an incubation grant from the Ford Foundation and was later supported mainly by the UNDP. We are based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), near Delhi University's North Campus. We run a web-based resource centre, (www.im4change.org), conduct media research and hold capacity-building workshops for rural reporters and civil society activists. While the media research we undertake is wide-ranging, the workshops are aimed at improving media's understanding about democracy, development and inclusion.

The members of the Inclusive media team, Vipul Mudgal ([email protected]), Chandan Shrivastawa ([email protected]), and Shambhu Ghatak ([email protected]) avoid taking hard ideological positions and welcome suggestions/ criticism about our work from anyone who cares to write to us

The main objective of the Inclusive Media for Change is to highlight for public concern and action the issues of livelihoods, agriculture and inclusive development through better and sharper media coverage. The idea is to monitor and mainstream the issues of India marginalized through advocacy, research and better visibility in the media.

The web-based resource centre (www.im4change.org) you are logged into is designed mainly for media persons, policy-makers and researchers who need to make sense of rural Indias multiple crises and other issues of the marginalized. It has thousands of links and cross references and a rich section of news clippings on a variety of subjects related to livelihoods and development alternatives.

For journalists looking for news stories, im4change.org offers a ready resource of ideas, cues and leads, complete with statistics, backgrounders and quotes from experts and their contact details. The resource centre seeks to benchmark itself somewhere between journalism and development-oriented thinking. It collates consequential bits of information from key policy documents, authoritative data banks, academic papers and contemporary thinking on inequality and development challenges. All this is presented in the form of overviews, trends, backgrounders and fact-sheets so as to generate meaningful public debates.

The team hopes to effectively connect the dots to illustrate how a range of policy issues on livelihoods, human development, social and gender justice, and poverty mitigation are intertwined with, and complementary to, one another. The team sees its role as that of promoting ideas and alternatives rather than of generating media content