Reaching rural Indian villages through film

Rural life is central to India’s economy and culture. More than 700 million people live in small villages, and many city dwellers maintain close ties to the countryside.

When EDF started its climate change work in India, it quickly became clear that establishing partnerships and reaching out to rural villages would be a top priority.

Farmers are feeling global warming’s sting

We rapidly learned how Indian farmers are feeling the effects of climate change:

• Ground water levels are dropping
• Rainfall is less reliable than it used to be
• When it does rain, it often rains either too little or too much
• Seasonal patterns are shifting
• There is top soil loss

Villagers and rural farmers rarely talked about these changes in the context of global warming. With language and cultural differences and all the daily pressures of farming, many rural people didn’t know that faraway villages were facing the same situation, or that average global temperatures were rising.

We wanted to first provide villagers with more information about global warming before launching into projects like:

• drip irrigation
• carbon farming; and
• other sustainable solutions.

Climate information would have to be contextualized. Villagers face a slew of equally urgent problems, including poverty and the risk of hunger.

How do you reach 700 million people?

We researched many non-profit groups to find the right partner to help bring climate information to India’s villages. We quickly discovered the work of The Hunger Project, a global nonprofit that seeks sustainable solutions to hunger – mainly through empowering women in rural communities.

The Hunger Project works at the grassroots level with villages, local nonprofits and municipal governments. Its staffers host three-day leadership training workshops across India to help elected rural women build self-confidence and become leaders in their communities.

We approached The Hunger Project to ask if rural women might benefit from learning more about global warming. Would it help them to know that the changes they are facing are part of a larger global context? The answer was a resounding yes. The challenge: global warming was a new idea. There wasn’t even a word for it in many places.

All Indians – rural, urban, young and old – have at least one thing in common: Bollywood movies and tele-novela series on TV. Somebody asked if a film might help illustrate how climate change, a universal problem, was affecting rural lives and individuals.

Bollywood star tells global warming story

India’s long history of story-telling has blossomed in recent decades into the world’s most prolific film industry – Bollywood. And for those who live far from a theater, there are popular tele-novela series on TV.

The Hunger Project liked the idea of screening a film about climate change during its leadership training workshops. That’s how EDF became an Indian film producer.

A dialogue was established with a local production house in Delhi and a famous telenovela and Bollywood star, Anoop Soni, expressed an interest in starring in a video on climate change to be screened in rural areas.

The film, Arohan – meaning “a new beginning” in Hindi – links climate change to rural issues, including poverty, gender, and food and energy security. Essentially a docu-drama, the film talks to village leaders and details scientific facts about climate change. Most importantly, it delivers a powerful message of hope by showing that many solutions to climate change are local and low technology.

The film premiered on The Hunger Project’s leadership training agenda in July 2009. EDF is now working closely with The Hunger Project to gather feedback on how the film has been received.