The demand for water and electricity is going to go up exponentially, both in rural and urban areas. There is need for sensitizing masses towards “judicious” use of water and electricity. Otherwise, it will put pressure on national and state resources. This will have many fold direct and indirect impact on quality of human life as well as its surroundings, adversely affecting vital indicators of Human Development
We have been assigned to develop communication strategies on "Save Water and Save Electricity" targeting rural audience in Gujarat. We desire to learn from similar or comparative communication strategies which have made an impact. We are looking for any existing events in rural Gujarat that could be successfully used as communication opportunity. The idea is not to plan any stand alone communication initiative but to work on something which already exists and thus could be an effective, easily implement able and sustainable for Rural Gujarat.
The Big idea would be how to engage rural community at large on a continuous and sustainable manner in some sort of communicative event in a interesting manner so that it lead to behaviour change.
The ideal situation out of the proposed strategy in would be that people know the best practises to save electricity and water, get convinced and also stretch little extra to save water and save electricity.
We would also like to understand the issues pertaining to water and electricity in rural Gujarat from all possible perspectives (community, farmers, experts, activists, environmentalists and government officials etc), exploring correct entry points for rural Gujarat psyche to push development issues, past experiences in rural communication interventions in Gujarat or elsewhere, media consumption habits of rural Gujarat, understanding Rural Gujarat communities’ own developmental priorities and looking for any innovative way to engage individual minds to walk though a communicative process.
We would like to target School going children, Youths, Women groups (sakhi mandal -SHG), Rural opinion leaders, Farmers, Rural at large.
Though this e consultation, which we are sharing with all having long standing experiences of in development sector and are established communication and development experts of national and International eminence.
We request following inputs and references:
- Suggest name of individuals and institution we must interact and learn from their programmatic and communication experiences, ideally from save water and save electricity communication perspective.
- Suggest reports, process documentations and references that help us to understand Gujarat from development, communication, water and electricity management perspectives better.
- Kindly provide us references of professionals who has done similar (save electricity and save water) and/or comparable communication efforts (any rural campaign) ideally in Gujarat or even elsewhere. We would also request to share this e consultation note with them for their inputs.
- Let us know, if any vital target group has been misses out by us and suggest those target groups.
- Kindly share with us what kind of events, ideally communicative event that could engage the above mentioned target group for reasonable time to have desired effect.
- Any relevant culture, practices, success stories around saving water and electricity in Gujarat or else were which could give some clue how it happened and how to upscale it.
- Any success story to learn lesson from
NOTE: Please also forward this mail to those who you believe would give relevant inputs.
Kindly also mark it to us so that we could follow it with him or her personally.
Please reach us for any clarifications.
Contact
ICON Communications
ANUPAM SHRIVASTAV <shrivastavanupam@gmail.com>
Mobile 91-9408567550
Vijay Bharatiya <vijaybharatiya@yahoo.com>
Mobile: 91-9427700762