Santakar Chelapila, alongside a small group of socially conscious citizens, started training a handful of Koraput students in the basics of journalism and posting their stories on school walls in 2004. The idea soon attracted support from UNICEF, and the Child Reporters programme was formally launched the following year. Volunteers trained a hundred children, and asked them to write every day in special notebooks. “At first, they wrote about school,” Chelapila said, “but then they dove into the bigger social issues.” Soon selected stories were also being published in a bi-monthly magazine called Ankurodgam—roughly, “the sprouting of the seed”—distributed to parents, district officials and journalists. The project grew, and by 2007 it involved over five thousand children in 539 schools, whose best contributions were published in a monthly inset, edited by children, in Anupam Bharat, one of Odisha’s leading vernacular dailies. In the Lede, Vivekananda Nemana and Ankita Rao meet the child reporters of Odisha.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 05:30:00 +0000
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