Now, Bengalureans can help Adivasis lead better lives

BENGALURU: A countrywide initiative that will start from Bengaluru and involves techies and researchers based here, will enable people living in cities to help solve everyday problems of Adivasis — such as absentee teachers in government schools, corrupt officials, non-payment of wages and others — who are caught in the crossfire of the Maoist-government conflict.

Set to start on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, October 2, the idea behind the ‘Mobile Satyagraha’, is for people here and subsequently in other cities to call respective government departments and particular officials in the restive areas of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Maharashtra and other regions inhabited by the tribals. Calls from urban areas are expected to jolt officials to solve these problems.  

Information about specific problems and coordinates of concerned authorities will be shared through an app that is presently being designed. Researchers from IIIT-Bangalore are helping in the design of the app.
Mobile Satyagraha has been started by and marks the next step for CGNet Swara — a voice-based mobile platform and a kind of citizen journalist news service — that has been used by Adivasis (mostly the Gondi tribe of central India) — to report their grievances, since 2010. These messages then get edited and are put on a website for the public to see.  

CGNet Swara was started by former BBC journalist, Shubranshu Choudhury and winner of 2014 Google Digital Activism Award. About the new initiative, he says, “The Mobile Satyagraha app will be ready by this month. All a person needs to do is to take out some time, call those officers and request them to solve a particular problem. We will fight problems in these areas non-violently just like Gandhi,” he says. He further adds, “This is better than Adivasis figuring out what to do all by themselves. What we also found, is that officers get jittery when people call from different places especially urban areas. When the urban population support this cause we will see democracy also functioning better.”

A trial run of Mobile Satyagraha was conducted at the IIIT-Bangalore and members of the CGNet team and researchers from the institute participated. “Government officials in the tribal belts did take our call when we called them, listened to us, and in certain cases responded as well. Whether it was resolved or not, can be learned only if the person who registered it, reports on it further,” says Amit Prakash, Associate Professor, IIIT-Bangalore. Similar pilots were conducted in Raipur and Mumbai.

Peace March

Shubranshu Choudhury and 150 Adivasis from Telangana and Odisha will begin a 200-kilometre peace march for 10 days on October 2, taking the same route that Maoists took in 1980, to request peace from all sides and put an end to the conflict.