Issues of Rural Development in Mainstream Journalism: Exploring New Strategies for Media Intervention

The present study, which is in the form of a vision document, intends to explore alternative ways of linking up expanding media business with the rural development in such a way that both rural economy and media economy get entrenched into a win–win situation. In the process, the study offers an overview of how the print and electronic media have been consistently neglecting the coverage of rural issues that has resulted in the lopsided growth of Indian economy. The study further argues that extending support to rural issues/problems of development has become, for long, solely the job of government driven media without the participation of either public or private sector electronic media. A number of quantitative studies documented earlier only proved that the space devoted for the development journalism in the mainstream press was negligible compared to their marketing and industry coverage. While the success of rural newspapers has the dubious distinction of espousing the cause of rural India, a holistic approach to the problems of rural India is yet wanting on the media front. Grounded in qualitative communication research, the present study discursively endeavours to offer some strategies of expansion of media that offers new vistas of business and marketing for the media industry by converting the most important and burning issues of rural India into windows of inclusive growth and progress, besides bridging the digital divide between the rural and the urban India.