| About Voice of Bharat
VoiceOfBharat.org is a platform to give voice to sustainability
related issues of bharat. The concept of Sustainability, as we believe,
is much wider than individual or organisational sustainability.
It is about the sustainability of the universe, of which Mother
Earth is a major factor, and of which 17% humans live in India (Bharat).
This simple means that any social, economic and developmental imbalance
in Bharat is bound to affect the global sustainability more than
most of the other nations. And the concept of Sustainability was
known to people of Bharat long before the corporates across the
world started talking about it, when veda's talked about Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam.
So what will VoiceOfBharat.org cover ?
At National Level, we will talk to the thought leaders to understand
the national level social, developmental, environmental and economic
challenges, and successful programmatic solutions to address these
challenges and what they think the government must do to address
these challenges in terms of policy / scheme / legal / implementation
level changes. And we will integrate the thoughts of multiple experts
on each issue and share our own analysis on what the government
and other stakeholders should do.
Our idea is to create a resource group of 3 to 5 national level
thought leaders per issue. The inputs from these resources are not
only meant for use by Central & State Governments, National
& Regional political parties, MPs & MLAs, NAC, EAC, MPs,
funding agencies, corporates and media but also by every Indian
to understand the national challenges and how they can contribute
to India's development constructively. For this to happen, we will
convert the inputs from thought leaders into our own creative mass
campaigns or support the existing campaigns from the government
as well as civil society. Our target is to cover about 60 issues
in the first year of operation (April 2011 to March 2012) by talking
to about 250 national experts. Our visitors can listen to key part
of the discussions in audio format and also read about the same
in text format. We will start a similar excercise at state level
from October 2011.
At the District Level, we plan to talk to about 3 to 5 district
level NGOs. After a pilot at district level, in 2010-11, where we
have talked to NGOs from about 550 out of India's 642 districts,
we are now working on a structure, where for each district, we will
invite 3 to 5 large NGOs, who will share district level challenges
and solutions which will, on one hand be good inputs to local MPs
/ MLAs, and on the other hand, opportunity for social investors
and philanthropists for partnership.
India has 593 731 habitated villages. At our end, we have put demographic
profiles of each of these villages online, and through our search
engine, you can search the village of your interest not only by
just name search, but through multiple search criteria like population
range, sex ratio range....And while the present structure is based
on 2001 census numbers, to help our visitors get a better idea,
we will share the decadeal growth rate of each state as indicated
by provisional statements of 2011 census, so that one can get a
fair idea of what the numbers for each village will be. At the starting
point, as a pilot, we have started talking to the village heads
- sarpanch, from just two districts, Thane & Pune. We have covered
about 300 sarpanch from these regions and now plan to start interviewing
sarpanch from across the country with the help of local resources,
as guided by IndianNGOs.com
While our visitors can learn about the national, regional and district
issues through the voice of related experts and thought leaders,
its important that they listen to the very communities which face
these challenges. And with this in mind, we plan to cover at least
10 to 20 members representing each community issue. To start with,
we will share with you views from BPL families, underprivileged
children, commercial sex workers, children, villagers...
To ensure that VoiceOfBharat.org covers the voice of not only citizens
of India but other forms of life, we will share with you the voices
of India's animals, rivers and other forms of life. As a starting
point, we will share the voice of India's National Animal (Tiger),
National Bird (Peacock), National River (Ganga)...To give you authentic
voices, we will send invites to our local resources to share these
voices.
VoiceOfBharat.org is not just about voices and views and interviews.
The portal, as you would have seen will cover demographic information
of each of India's 593 731 villages, 642 districts and 35 States
& Union Territories. The portal will share lots of data on multiple
issues - we believe that the data available with the government
is most authentic and would share part of it in our own analysis
format (in instances where the civil society does not believe the
data - like the census 2001 disability data, which many in the sector
feel is about 30% to 40% of real numbers- we will highlight the
thoughts). The poral will also share highlights of central government's
policies, schemes and laws....The portal will soon start a section
of terminologies for each issue so that our visitors understand
the government / funding agencies / expert's language
See the clock on the home page of the portal to see how much time
we are left with for 2020
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