About CGNet Swara

CGNet Swara is a voice-based portal, freely accessible via mobile phone, that allows anyone to report and listen to stories of local interest. Reported stories are moderated by journalists and become available for playback through our website and social media, over the phone and using our Bultoo Radio application for collecting and disseminating information in media dark zones.

Contents


Overview

Many of the estimated 80 million members of India's tribal communities lack access to any mainstream media outlets. This often poses serious barriers to their socio-economic development, as their grievances about government neglect and economic exploitation remain unvoiced. In addition, certain factions (such as the Maoist insurgency) can exploit their frustration and isolation to violent ends.

To address this important problem, we have built and deployed CGNet Swara: a voice portal that enables ordinary citizens to report and discuss issues of local interest. To use it, they call a phone number using any mobile (or fixed line) phone. Callers are prompted to press "1" to record a new message, and "2" to listen to messages that have already been recorded. Once a message has been recorded from the field, professional, trained journalists, who access the system using a Web-based interface, review and verify the report. Approved reports are then made available for playback over the phone. The reports also can be accessed on the CGNet Swara website.

During our years of experimenting with IVR, we came to realise that the technology excludes potential users living in areas without any mobile network. It came to our notice that even in dark zones of LWE (Left Wing Extremism) affected regions without signals, smart phones were available among the population and was used to watch and disseminate popular entertainment content. The entire information ecosystem was dependent on Bluetooth for file transfers, which is in-built into their phones and works without any signal. Subsequently we designed the Bultoo Radio application, which facilitates a new means of media dissemination and content collection from no-network areas using a novel incentive scheme.

Through our impact driven journalism model, we have successfully fostered community resilience and peace in the region by giving a voice to millions of tribal community members in the region. Mobile Satyagraha, our flagship program, experiments with creating a model to solve governance issues reported on the platform with the help of socially aware and concerned urban citizens. It has been in the forefront of the fight against the economic hardships caused by the ongoing Covid-19 crisis and helped many poor migrants, laborers and rural villagers. Throughout the years of its existence CGNet has given emphasis to preserve the diverse culture and different languages in the central Indian region. As a part of the ongoing effort, CGNet has partnered with Microsoft Research India and IIIT – Raipur to create a Machine Translation tool for Gondi (a low-resource vulnerable language spoken by around 2.3 million tribal people in south and central India) using a novel attempt in data collection using micro-contributions through tribal community members in the region.

CGNet Swara was launched as part of the Knight International Journalism Fellowships, a program of the International Center for Journalists. For more background on CGNet Swara, we invite you to view the following videos:

Shubhranshu Choudhary.
TEDx Talk in Bangalore.
January 21, 2012.
 
National Geographic.
Using Mobile Phones to Empower India's Poor.
June 18, 2014.

Technology

The software underlying CGNet Swara is open-source. The system was originally developed as a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently maintained with the support of Microsoft Research India and several volunteers.

While the technology for building interactive voice services (IVR) has been around for a long time, what distinguishes CGNet Swara is the ability for callers to contribute information to the system. Most IVR platforms are designed for callers to listen to messages, but on CGNet Swara, they can also record their own messages for others to hear. Our platform includes a moderator's interface that enables privileged users to review the recordings, and optionally annotate or edit them, prior to making them public.

For those living in an area without even the phone signal required to access the IVR platform, our Bultoo Radio application allows them to record a message in an area without internet. Upon accessing internet at a later time, these recordings are sent to our trained journalists who produce stories on the basis of these reports. Users of Bultoo Radio application can also distribute these stories to others in their village via Bluetooth, which works without any internet or signal.

The CGNet Swara server can be easily replicated. The system requirements are:

  • A desktop computer running Linux and Asterisk.
  • An Internet connection (for hosting the Web server).
  • A telephony interface.
  • We have also made the code for Bultoo Radio open-source.

We are happy to offer guidance to other organizations who are seeking to establish similar services around the world.

Publications

The following publications were authored by (or in cooperation with) the CGNet Swara team:


Team

Overall Lead

Shubhranshu Choudhary is a Knight International Journalism Fellow and the founder of CGNet Swara. Shubhranshu was a BBC South Asia producer for more than 10 years. He also has served as a media trainer for the BBC World Service Trust, the United Nations and Indian universities. He produced the first television coverage of foreign militants operating in Indian Kashmir and conducted the first television interview with the chief commander of the Kashmiri militant organization. He was a TV and radio producer for the BBC's South Asia bureau for eight years, and a reporter for The Guardian's South Asia bureau for two years. He was a reporter for five years at the Hindi-language Daily Deshbandhu.

Researchers

Devansh Mehta (2017-2024), Bill Thies (2010-2026), Kalika Bali, Krittika D’Silva, Megh Marathe, Preeti Mudliar, Paromita Pain, Colin Scott, Aditya Vasishtha, Priyanka Verma.

Urban Team

Arjun Venkatraman (2010-2014), Sheikh Haneef, Vishnu Prasad, Kundan Sahu, Diptendu Roy.

Rural Team

Bhan Sahu, Ramashankar Das, Habibuddin Gandhi, Santosh Ghosh, Ramesh Kasa, Kanhaiya Kewat, Rakesh Kewat, Vipin Kirar, Ramesh Kunjam, Bhagirath Lodhi, Babulal Neti, Lalsu Nogoti, Raju Rana, Pavan Satyarthi, Shatali Shedmake, Shilpi, Geeta Tekam, Sunil Kumar, Mohan Yadav.

Technical Contributors

Latif Alam, Chiraag, Tarun Sai Chitta, TB Dinesh, Prof Rajesh Ingle, Samujjal Purkayastha, Ananya Saxena, Alok Sharma, Anurag Shukla, Manav Singh, Prof Srinivasa KG, Virendra Singh.

Collaborators, Advisors and Supporters

Amitabh Behar, Sharad Behar, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Smita Choudhary, Sachchidanand Joshi, Amit Prakash, Anoop Saha, Vivek Seshadri, KG Suresh, Jagdish Upasane.

Support

CGNet Swara is made possible by the generous support of several organizations, including:

We are also indebted to generous support from government offices, including:

  • British High Commission

  • District Administration of Balrampur Surajpur Bastar, Kondagaon and Dantewada

  • Department of Education, Government of Chhattisgarh

  • Ministry of Culture, Government of India


Contact Us

Most of our team is based in New Delhi and Bangalore, India.

Inquiries can be addressed to Shubhranshu Choudhary at shu@cgnet.in.