Winners

Initiative: Skin Stories
Organization: Point of View
Country: India
Facebook: @POVMumbai
Twitter: @POVMumbai
Website: www.pointofview.org

Skin Stories is the online publication of the sexuality and disability programme at Point of View. The uniqueness of this platform is that it is solely dedicated to publishing first person narratives on disability, sexuality and gender. A community of growing writers does not only talk about sexuality but a myriad other aspects of living with disabilities and debilitating conditions such as navigating friendships, family, relationships, workplaces, homes, fears, discrimination, stigma, and more. Together, the essays complicate simplistic notions about what it means to live with disability, and bust harmful myths surrounding this issue.

Point of View uses its presence on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to the weekly Skin Stories and to create room for dialogue on difficult issues around sexuality and disability, all through keeping the social media posts sensitive and respectful. Point of View also organises tweetathons and Facebook Live chats, using #SexDisChat, once a month with authors of Skin Stories, members from partner organisations, activists and influencers from across the world. Through this and more, Skin Stories reach 1,30,000 readers every month.

Initiative:  Land Conflict Watch
Organization: Land Conflict Watch
Country: India
Facebook: @LCWIndia
Twitter: @LandConflicts
Website: www.landconflictwatch.org

In the last couple of decades, India’s aim for industrial and infrastructure growth has led to its acquisition of more and more land, often by ignoring and sometimes bulldozing land rights of vulnerable communities. Some of these conflicts turn violent and violate human rights. However, there is no national database of land conflicts, and many of these conflicts go unreported in national media. To bridge this gap, journalists Ankur Paliwal and Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava started Land Conflict Watch in 2016.

Land Conflict Watch is an independent, research-based data-journalism project that maps and documents land conflicts involving communities across India to initiate political debate and policy discourse on land rights. Land Conflict Watch is a website that uses extensive amounts of public data to document cases of conflicting claims over land use and ownership. So far, it has documented over 550 ongoing conflicts across 2 million hectares of land, which affect more than six million people and investments worth 14.3 trillion rupees. These cases are also profiled on social media as and when they are reported, thus bringing attention to the scale of such conflicts and engaging people in a dialogue on the same.

Initiative:  Voice Of Azamgarh Community Radio
Organization: Voice Of Azamgarh Community Radio
Country: India
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Voice-Of-Azamgarh-Community-Radio-463847713744070/
Twitter: NA
Website: NA

Voice of Azamgarh Community Radio Station was started in 2011 with the vision of holistic development for the community members of Anjan Shaheed village of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. Devoid of any other radio station in Azamgath, this community radio station has become the real voice of the community and has dedicated shows to create awareness regarding pertinent everyday issues, identify local latent, preserve regional culture, and empower the marginalised people, especially women.

Besides using the community radio as a prime medium for dissemination of information, Voice of Azamgarh uses social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, to build an online community of conscious citizens, create awareness among community members about pertinent issues, empower them with information, and encourage a problem-solving approach among community members. They use their social media presence to talk about health, hygiene, voters’ rights, democracy, government schemes and other local issues, thus encouraging community dialogue and participation.

Special Mentions

Initiative: Bhadipa
Organization: Bharatiya Digital Party
Country: India
Facebook: @bhadipa
Twitter: @BhaDiPa
Website: https://bit.ly/2H4bZLw

 

Bharatiya Digital Party aka Bhadipa was the first exclusively Marathi YouTube channel that continues to be one of the biggest players in the online Marathi market even today. Launched with the realisation that there wasn’t enough Marathi content that youth could relate to, Bhadipa aims to give a platform to Maharashtra’s youth creators and bring back the ‘cool quotient’ in regional language entertainment.

Bhadipa hosts all its content on YouTube where it has organically reached 1,40,000 subscribers. Further, it uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat to maximise the reach of its audio-visual content and engage with the audience. It frequently uses polls, interacts with followers through comments and does live Q&A with fans. These and other efforts have helped Bhadipa to build a growing and strong fans base who not only view the audio-visual content but even feel motivated to buy their merchandise. Bhadipa is determined to deliver more innovative and creative content to the state’s youth.