News that matters this election season

The organisation I work with publishes the environment and development fortnightly magazine Down To Earth. The publication is not designed to make money and is not a produce of commerce or a product of the market. It is our means to bring information about the world around us, about the everyday life and of life itself, so that we have the knowledge, which gives us the power to make change. In other words, when we write we make no effort to hide our mission — our neutrality as journalists remains in the skill of reporting news and events from the ground. But our bias and politics are open — not hidden in reams of corporate gloss — but are an open dare about making the change we want in this world.

The question I want to discuss with you is my understanding of Down To Earth’s (and other such publications’) relevance in today’s India and today’s world. Today is a cynic’s world, where we are seeing as never before the race to the bottom. Countries are showing us their worst sides; leaders are turning into venomous creatures out to polarise people. Real issues are getting lost in the dust and fifth of this virulent discourse, where everybody — all of us — seems “free” only to the extent that we can spill out our vile guts in the now not so open social media. There is no societal decorum that puts lines around what can be said in public and what not.

In this situation, should we ask ourselves, have we failed? Should we even continue hoping against hope that we can make a difference to public opinion? Can we really hope to keep the focus on the real issues that matter?

I believe we must. I also believe that whatever we are seeing today in our world, it is our duty, our job — if you want to call it that — to keep pushing the envelope so that this whimper of real news becomes a scream. 

I say this particularly as India is in the midst of elections. In this year, we will get a new government, or we will get the old government as new. Whatever the future, the fact is that magazines like Down To Earth must be there to report on issues that oncern our today and tomorrow.

In this election, we have seen that the real issues that matter to people — climate change, which is driving weird weather to destroy crops; insurance companies that do not provide farmers relief to cope with this distress; produce that is not getting value to pay for the labour of farmers; pollution that is destroying livelihoods and health and, worse, the drought that it crippling large parts of the country all out of the frame. 

Nothing real seems to get our attention anymore. These are not eyeball issues. Social media misses these trends. Politicians today want us to believe that they can afford to forget local issues, issues that matter to their constituents, and still win election. Elections then are about on poisoned words and polarised polities.

But it is also a fact that even though these issues that matter are not at the top of the headline in this election season, these are omnipresent in the words between the lines. It is in this time of election that we hear the voices from the ground up. All newspapers send their best reporters to explain all that is happening from farm to factory. This is the only time when we hear that whimper of people — and if you read carefully you will find that report after report, region after region, people are saying that the most important issues for them are the ones that matter. The most important issues are employment, livelihood, water scarcity, drought, unseasonal rain, which lead to crop damage and no compensation, menace of stray cattle and attacks by wild animals. In many reports you will read about how waste dumps are being built near their homes or that they are living in hell, because of pollution from local factories or that they have no drainage or no sanitation.

So, even if these voices get discounted in this election of 2019, they will not go away. The real issues of livelihood and survival will not go away. They cannot be swallowed up or spit out. They are real. They matter. The only choice then is that all of us, who work in this business of change, must ensure that news that has been shuttered to the margins becomes the main.

The other question is more basic — how do we sustain the quest for information as societies become more knowledge-proof and governments become more intolerant? I believe that to remain relevant, we must ensure that we continue to have the credibility of facts and independence of position. This then is our common challenge — one I hope we will succeed in.

The writer is at the Centre for Science and Environment

sunita@cseindia.org

Twitter: @sunitanar