Right to Know — Episode 2 — Reaching the unreachable

Listen to Episode 2

In this episode, we travel to the Indo-Nepalese border and listen in on two public meetings where some people discover, for the first time, just what a pension is and that they are eligible for one. And a building we are filming in is struck by lightning.

Tribal villagers in Betiah learn about their eligibility for a pension and how they need access to a web site to register for one (Photo: Mubeen Siddiqui for Ocean in a Drop)

Komal (R) provides free internet access to tribal villagers on the Indo-Nepalese border (Photo: Cathy Cheng)

Right to Know is an ethnographic (and anecdotal) podcast series about people coming to terms with the internet in some of India’s poorest rural and tribal districts, where many have not seen a television, or as in the ancient city of Chanderi, in early 2015 locals were still coming to terms with cars and scooters.

Research for this series was conducted on the ground from January to May 2015. Production was completed in 2018.

Presented and produced by Andrew Garton Right to Know was commissioned by the Association for Progressive Communications with support from the Digital Empowerment Foundation.

Adapted from the book Right to Know: India’s Internet Avant-garde (Garton, A 2017) and the film Ocean in a Drop (2017).

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