Gandhiji and Developmental Journalism

Gandhiji was undoubtedly the most prolific and indefatigable writer among his contemporary world leaders or since then. His complete works spans 50,000 pages and 100 volumes, and apart from the several letters, lectures, informal talks and notes that were written by him, bulk of this material is what he wrote in the various journals and newspapers that he contributed to, if not edited himself. He wrote his first newspaper article at the age of 21 in London and subsequently had been editing one journal or another between 1906 till 1948 , contributing every week to the journals and in 3 languages, viz., Hindi, Gujarati and English.


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Journal of Rural Development, Vol. 38, No. 3, July -September : 2019   Ford Foundation (Altshull, 1984:151 Vilanilam (1975) viewed developmental journalism as that "deals with the process of development in developing nations". Further, Aggarwal (1978a) felt that developmental journalism should report the developmental processes instead of mere reporting the events. But, development news need not emphasise on happenings that take place at a particular moment or on a particular day, but should focus on happenings that will take place over a period of time. His view of development news is "to cover the entire gamut of socio-economic and cultural development-even non-development problems as well as prospects". Furthermore, Aggarwal (1978b) reasoned out that development news need not differ in its treatment from regular news or investigative reporting. Moreover, it can cover development issues at the macro and micro levels and can adopt different forms at national and international levels.
The perspective of a development journalist is to critically examine, assess and report the relevance of a development project to national and local needs, while explaining "the differences between its

Gandhiji and Developmental Journalism
However, Mahatma Gandhiji in India was practicing developmental journalism even before the term, developmental journalism was coined in Asia. As a journalist, Mahatma Gandhiji expressed the view that the newspaper's role was to educate the masses, and hence he was writing immensely on contemporary topics. For instance, Krishna Murthy India. The Nationalist Press, for instance, exposed some social evils like casteism, child marriages, ban on remarriage of widows, social, legal, and other inequalities in society while carrying out a massive campaign to educate the people on the eradication of untouchability" (Krishna Murthy, 1966;Desai, 1993:237;Yadav, 1985). They thought that journalism was an instrument for them in awakening the masses socially and politically during freedom movement (Yadav, 1985;Parthasarathy, 1991). "To ask India's women to take to contraceptives is to say the least, putting the cart before the horse.
The first thing is to free her from mental slavery, to teach her the sacredness of her body, and to teach her the dignity of national service and the service of humanity". At the same time, he was a visionary though he denied it, and he foresaw the things that would happen in the coming decades. One trait of a development journalist is that he/she should signal the coming events before the people would understand the consequences of any action (Murthy, 2010). Gandhiji

Gandhiji and Developmental Journalism
His view of an ideal Indian village was explained by him in Harijan of July 26, 1942 : "It is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its vital wants, and yet interdependent for many other wants in which dependence is necessity. Thus, every village's first concern will be to grow its own food crops and cotton for its cloth. It should have a reserve for its cattle, recreation and playground for adults and children. Then if there is more land available, it will grow useful money crops, thus excluding ….tobacco, opium, and the like. The village will maintain a village theatre, school and public hall. It will have its own water works ensuring clean supply. This can be done through controlled wells and tanks (reservoirs). Education will be compulsory up to the final basic course. As far as possible, every activity will be conducted on a cooperative basis.' To this modest blueprint, which, however, seemed like a sketch of heaven to India's permanently underfed farmers, Gandhi added another wild dream: electricity in every village home (Fischer, 1994 (Menefee and Menefee, 1967).
In 1969, B.G.Verghese, the then editor of The Hindustan Times, New Delhi proved that the development reporting would be helpful to accelerate development. Verghese asked a team of reporters to write periodically about Chattera, a small village in Haryana, about its people, their problems and the process of development taking in that village (Yadav, 1991). Aggarwal (1978a) reported: "Our village, Chattera.... is a bold attempt to give rural orientation to the predominantly urban-based and elite-oriented newspapers in the country. It is the form of journalism that can prove of immense help in bridging the rural-urban communication gap in the Third World".

Conclusion
Gandhiji as a role model in journalism pioneered development journalism and hence the modern Indian Press can emulate Gandhian perspective of developmental journalism. Thus, the press needs to give top priority to developmental campaigns for the benefit of the public. As a socially responsible press, the newspapers in the country must cover developmental issues by increasing the frequency of news coverage issues while dedicating more space to them. However, development-related issues appear in the newspaper when a crisis or an issue hit the country, and newspapers can signal the on-set of crisis instead of reporting the post-events.
However, the growth of print media has been a phenomenon in the last five years in the country with the increase in circulation or readership. With the increase in the reach of the newspapers, the invention of technology and also the growth of