In the globalised era, the mainstream media has become increasingly commercialised and has the tendency to be insensitive to concerns and needs of people beyond the ambit of its immediate consumers. Major Indian dailies today give scant coverage to development related issues earmarking just about 5 to 6 percent of space for the sector. The rationale is that development pages do not generate any revenue.  So media has become increasingly urban centric to match target consumers. Critical social problems, especially those that affect 70% of the Indian populace that lives in rural India are either ignored or are only briefly hinted at. 

The Executive, Judiciary and the legislature do not come under any pressure to address these issues since the mainstream media, the fourth estate, or watchdog on governance deliverables, does not raise these issues.  Even in the cities, urban poor constitute a major percentage of the population, whose travails and problems go unaddressed by media. Amidst such scenario, Tarun Kanti Bose has been awakening the latent talent for expression among the activists, children and women to enable them to become barefoot journalists and raise relevant issues and bring them to the fore through the via media of an alternative media framework to make up for the mainstream media''s deficit on these issues. 

48- year old Tarun, a resident of Delhi has been working with this idea for the past 12 years under various dispensations and banners, with various communities (culturally and linguistically diverse), it has been possible to fine tune this idea to a large extent to be confident about the results it can produce. His idea is new and innovative because not many have tried to do it this way before, with any iota of success. His approach has fetched results since he started working on this idea more than a decade ago.

“It all started off, when I was covering displacement of tribals, Jaduguda's uranium mining, Tarapur's nuclear effluent leakage undertaking high degrees of risk. Then I decided to educate the local communities on their issues, which would help in developing their own modes of communication.”

While moving into the deeper of the interiors of the country, he saw those working among the communities had the emotional resonance linking up with the issues at the ground but what they needed was articulation. If their writing and communicati