Year Ender 2018

Partnership with BARC and ORMAX

ACEE’s partnerships with Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) and Ormax Media facilitated in understanding the reach of various shows in General Entertainment Channels (GECs) across the Hindi Speaking Markets (HSMs). Their scientific approach to studying the reach of channels and Ormax’s inputs on the Top-rated shows in UP and Bihar, led us to look into specific shows for the interventions. The current disruptions in the media and entertainment industries and the many fragmentations of viewerships across demographics have unleashed an atmosphere of learning and of finding solutions therefore it was an opportunity for the program team to find acceptance from the otherwise cautious industry senior cadres.

The sharing and give and take between us and these partnerships also helped to make the process followed for seamless integrations of key issues surrounding social norms and to study the shift in audience behaviours and attitudes towards them, to some of the most popular entertainment vehicles, a culture in the industry. The sales, marketing as well as programming teams of all the channels that we worked with to make the interventions were involved in the discussions at several levels and they also showed keen interest in learning measurement techniques and on building on talking points for their respective shows.

Keeping the audience fragmentation in mind, ACEE undertook an approach to use every opportunity that came its way and to consolidate learnings from other projects that The Third Eye program was also working on during the period of time.

1. Media Landscape Analysis and Round Table discussions with Gender, Media and Culture experts in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lukhnow and New Delhi
The Third Eye program worked with Girl Effect Program, UK to better understand the media landscape in India and how best Girl Effect can create a media offering and strategy to help adolescent girls in India. The program team executed two exhaustive Media Landscape Analyses of Indian entertainment for youth. The two rounds of the Media Landscape Analysis gave the program team a grip on the present situation and the take home was a bird’s eye view of the audience fragmentation taking place in real time. An accurate targetting of interventions was made possible by this exercise.
The program also facilitated and hosted a series of round table discussions with about eighty Gender, Media and Culture experts who have innovated in their respective fields and places of work and given direction to the Gender discourse in India.
The series of discussions explored the topics of Media, Culture and Gender and how they play themselves upon lives of populations in India. The Third Eye program facilitated the discussions in 10 sessions and travelled from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, Lucknow, and Delhi.
These meetings with such powerful experts provided the study a spectrum of diverse views regarding family planning and reproductive health and where they intersected with the gender discourse. These were opportunities for The Third Eye program to gain insights on the role that media plays in influencing gender norms among men and women and it therefore used the experience and knowledge derived to enrich the on going research study.
Experts who shared their perspectives on gender, media and culture in Mumbai included Deepa Gahlot Film, Theatre Critic, Columnist, Author; Maanvi Gagroo Actress, Disney India & TVF Pitchers; Rohan Joshi Stand-up comedian, All India Bakchod; Tara Khandelwal Correspondent, SheThePeople.TV; Varsha Patra Co-founder, Homegrown; Venkat Nettimi EVP, Head of Strategy and Consumer Insights, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd.; Lakshmi Lingam Head, Dept for Women & Gender Studies, TISS; Nawneet Ranjan Filmmaker, Founder –Dharavi Diary: A Slum Innovation Project; Paromita Vohra Creative Director, Agents of Ishq, Columnist; Dr. Ravina Aggarwal Director, Columbia Global Centers; Smarinitha Shetty Co-founder and CEO, India Development Review; Smita Vanniyar Researcher, Point of View; Brinda Miller Chudasama Artist & Director of Kala Ghoda Arts Festival; Gajra Kottary Screenplay and television writer; Kaizaad Kotwal Actor, Producer of the Vagina Monologues and Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal Actor, Producer of the Vagina Monologues; Noorjehan Safia Niaz Founder and Managing Trustee, Ashana Trust; and Vidhya Sankarnarayan Co-founder, Hyperlocal Design Thinking.

In the city of Lucknow the teams met with the grassroots leaders, media and gender experts, namely: Balbir Singh Mann, Founder Ummeed; Neelesh Mishra, Founder Gaon Connection; Dr Manju Agrawal Head, Department of Behavioural Sciences, Amity University; Dr Nishi Pandey Chief Proctor, Lucknow University & Head, Dept. of English; Piyush Antony Gender Specialist, UNICEF; Saritha Upadhyay Head - Strategy, Medha; Dr Smriti Singh Director, State Mahila Samakhya; Arundhati Dhuru Founder Trustee, Humsafar; Dhirendra Pratap Singh, Co-founder, Milaan Foundation (Girl Icons); Kulsum Talha Senior Journalist, Ex- Media Advisor, UNICEF; Richa Rastogi Humsafar; Shirin Abbas Dean, Journalism & Mass Communication at Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University; and Sunita Aron Journalist, Hindustan Times, Lucknow.

Similarly participants in Ahemdabad who shared insights and perspectives on the Gender, Media and Culture discourse in India were, Aakash Sethi Founder, Quest Alliance; Aditi Gupta Founder, Menstrupedia; Anahita Sarabhai Founder, QueerAbad; Gaurang Rawal Board of Directors, Sauhard Foundation; Harmony Siganporia Assistant Professor, MICA; Mathangi Krishnamurthy Assistant Professor, IIT-Madras and Pratik Sinha Founder, AltNews.

In New Delhi they were, Bella Das Executive Director, National Coalition for Education (NCE); Dr. Gitanjali Surendran Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School; Gouri Choudhury Social Activist |& Founder Member, Action India; Lisa Heydlauff Founder & Director, Going to School; Radharani Mitra National Creative Director & Executive Producer, BBC Media Action; Geeta Datta Executive Producer, NewsX; Poonam Muttreja Executive Director of the Population Foundation of India (PFI); Ritu Kapur Co-founder, The Quint; Subhashini Ali President, All India Democratic Women's Association; and Sunethra Chowdhry Journalist & TV Anchor, NDTV 24x7.

2. Little Directors Program in Bihar and Rajasthan

The Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI) in partnership with World Bank-DIME and Asian Centre for Entertainment Education (ACEE) conducted a series of filmmaking workshops along with an Impact Evaluation study with pre-adolescents and adolescents in the age group of 7 to 16 years belonging to the states of Bihar and Rajasthan. The adolescents participating in the workshops made films on the issue of Water and Sanitation and where it intersects with the issue of Gender. The data collected and the study engaged with the participants, their teachers, elders and communities As a pilot, the first five workshops were conducted in five different communities of Bihar namely Begusarai, Lakhisarai, Nawada and Rainbow Homes and Saidpur Slum from Patna and the next five workshops were conducted with children from Jhag, Kishanpura, Khatwad, Savli, Bhagwatsinghpura, Salrasu, Shrinivaspura, Ratakheda, Saarada and Kanseland Bagru villages belonging to Jaipur district in Rajasthan. A very preliminary reflection on the fieldwork, debriefs with the data collectors and implementation personnel revealed some interesting insights. Most of the adolescents participating in the workshops in Bihar and some of them who participated in Rajasthan were conversant with social media (Facebook, WhatsApp) and consumed a fair amount of television (not movies though). They consumed both Hindi and Bhojpuri content. Media has a vast influence on young girls and boys as to what their life aspirations will be. Young girls hardly had female role models were looked up to.

10 films made as part of the Little Directors Program

While the report of the study is still in the making at USC Annenberg Norman Lear Centre’s Hollywood Health and Society, our partners for this important study, which was conducted in 2018, here below are some key insights from the field i.e. across 7 blocks in 7 districts of UP and Bihar namely Barabanki, Barielly, Jaunpur and Jhansi in UP and Bhojpur, Darbhanga and Gaya in Bihar. One district from each of the 4 cultural zones of UP and 3 cultural zones of Bihar was chosen to achieve a representative sample.

I’d like to leave you with the following to ponder over as well as recall at the time when taking decisions about storytelling, especially for television audiences:

Television is the primary source of entertainment:
• Entertainment other than TV was limited everywhere. There were hardly any cinema halls in and around the localities visited.
• Women somehow felt it was status symbol to say they do not watch TV as they are too busy, but when prodded admitted to be watching a lot of drama on television.
• The fear of admittance to watching TV came from the fear of acknowledging openly that women indulge in any pleasure and watching as well as enjoying drama is considered to be a pleasure.
• Too much crime reporting on television builds fear and it stalls men from giving freedom to the women who belong to their families.

Mobility of men v/s women:
• Boys who are working in cities are beginning to demand educated brides, therefore girl children who are educated to an extent find better matches.
• Men carry progress back with themselves, urban behaviours and lifestyles every once in a year visit that they make to their villages.
• Women are starting to travel once in a while along with their children when they go to visit their husbands in the cities. They are therefore beginning to experience independence and nudging change towards progress in their own villages.
• People generally lack mobility, especially women, for whom it is unsafe to leave their homes to go to work or shopping. Women’s dependence on their fathers, brothers and husbands in not any longer the result of a need to perpetuate tradition and cultural norms but because of there not being safe spaces for them to negotiate their lives independently.
• Access for women to health centres, shops and other village-fairs was along with the presence of a male member of the family for the same reason.
• Men want their mothers, wives and daughters to be independent, but fear that they will be exploited if given freedom.
• Weekly visits to markets are windows to the world outside for women but it is the men who decide what needs to be bought, including what the children and women must wear. Jewellery and make up is also bought for most women by men because it is believed that they make more contemporary and modern choices, since they have got the exposure to the world outside, which women mostly don’t have.

Men and women don’t communicate with each other enough:
• There is almost no communication between husbands and their wives.
• There is too much formality between the mother-in-law and daughters-in-law for them to have conversations in which they can share their experiences with each other.
• Sisters-in-law don’t have conversations for fear of their mother-in-law and because they are afraid to upset their husbands.
• Most married women long to go to their parents’ homes where they are able to have conversations with their mothers and sisters with greater ease and comfort.
• A woman enduring pain is looked up to as sacrifice and applauded.

People at large still prefer having sons over daughters:
• Most women loved to claim during the interview that “ladka ladki ek hain”. However empirical baseline data shows a big disconnect here.
• Women mostly stuck to socially desirable responses on son-preference/ valuing girls belief-based questions. But data showed otherwise.
• The reason for preferring daughters over sons is no longer that sons will be their anchors during old age but that bringing up daughters and keeping them safe is a herculean task and then getting them married is expensive.

Girls at very young ages are mothers/wives:
• Girls from the age of 8 onwards are given charge of babies (their younger siblings) to take care of as the mothers are either busy working too hard, collecting water, washing, cooking, cleaning; or else producing more babies so that they have enough sons who will survive to look after them when they are older.
• Little girls cart around baby brothers and sisters, some call them their behen beti’s and bhai beta’s.
• Young girls and women don’t have the cognitive ability to either understand or articulate their thoughts and feelings so they accept all that they are asked to do as their normal. Also because of lack of exposure they believe that to question or show curiosity is not a good thing to do.
• Women never sat at the same level as males (i.e. an ordinary chair). We were constantly asked if we were married and got strange looks for lack of symbols of marriage (sindoor, bangles etc.)

Aspirations of people are high:
• Men and women both aspire to be like city dwellers and educate their children who they believe must escape the drudgery that they face in their own lives.
• Most children go to school and all men and women want to educate their children.
• People invest most of their earnings in educating their children but overlook nutritional and health needs, especially when it comes to girl children.
• Liberated city dwelling women are adored and and looked up towards and admired by both men and women.

As I sign off I can’t help but remember the middle aged man we met in a faraway village of Uttar Pradesh in 2014. He ran a tiny paan bidi shop and was father of three daughters, two of whom were now married. He asked me what I do for a living and I told him that I was a television writer. He looked me up and down and asked me a simple question, “Toh tu apni kahani kyun nahin batati duniya ko? Meri betiyon ki fail kahani kyun baar baar batati hai” (So why don’t you tell your own story to the world? Why do you tell the failed stories of my daughters’ to audiences over and over again?).