Of Civic Campaigns and Talent Searches

Two leading newspapers are currently in the middle of initiatives that seek to encourage public debate and participation in civic issues. The Times of India is doing the Lead India campaign and the Mumbai Project is Hindustan Times’ attempt at raising, debating and engaging stakeholders on civic issues plaguing the city (and god knows we have many).

While both are public campaigns, the differences are very telling. The TOI campaign takes a top-down approach – it invited SMS votes to select a candidate who may actually participate in the country’s electoral politics. The HT initiative is a completely bottom-up approach. Over two weeks, there were a lot of facts and some very good debates that were stirred and the newspaper simply served as a platform raising civic raising issues.

The TOI’s Lead India campaign was a marketing initiative complete with televised debates and celebrity moderators (they even asked a candidate’s wife to sing his favourite song on the TV show). They also roped in Shah Rukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan and the likes to promote the initiative with a huge television and outdoor campaign. Not that marketing the campaign by itself is wrong (in fact some of the TV ads are very nice). But at some point, it became a campaign highlighting the personalities rather than the issues they represented. And while I am willing to accept drama being a surrogate for singing in shows like the Indian Idol; issues like governance, education, infrastructure etc. are far too important to be decided through SMS campaigns.

The HT’s Mumbai Project on the contrary was primarily a journalist-driven initiative. It had a lot of meaningful content, in-depth analysis and a platform to debate those issues. The content was obviously put together with a lot of assiduous effort and hence there was enough material to have a serious engagement with.

In fact spending 15 minutes on each of the campaign websites highlights the stark differences between the two initiatives. One filled with relevant content and the other, a slickly packaged show. I don’t know about the larger world, but I would any day take the content.