You probably do not know but there is a law in India that says that if your husband dies while serving in the Army, you are entitled to pension if you marry your husbands brother. You also probably do not know that the width of the footpaths in cities such as Bangalore have to be a minimum of 1.5 metres but try finding a footpath in that city, forget measuring it.
Such similar other shocking facts were revealed by students who took part in the short-film making competition held at IIM Ahmedabad’s flagship management festival Confluence 2010. The competition was titled Campaign for a cause and it had to study whether government policies really reached their target population. Public policy is incidentally a popular elective at IIM Ahmedabad and students are given the liberty to take recourse to an audiovisual clip to make their point.
PaGaLGuY gives you a quick read on some of the films that the jury consisting of actor, activist and rugby player Rahul Bose and film maker Vipul Shah enjoyed most and the audience clapped to heartily.
Footpaths: This film was made by Samarth Saran, Saumya Tyagi and Bharat Sharma — a team of three people from the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, Bangalore.
Bharat told PaGaLGuY that the reason they chose Bangalore’s footpaths as a subject was because they felt that pedestrian hardly had any rights in our country. If you notice, governments build highways and expressways for car owners. There are also dedicated bus lanes but no one really thinks about walkers or simple pedestrians who need to walk from one place to the other. Nothing is really built specially for them though they have equal rights, said Bharat.
The team made the film when they were interning at IIM Bangalore and took about two months to finish the project. They captured the video on a simple handicam which meant that little investment other than their hard work went into the project.
During the shoot, the trio sometimes spent even the whole day in the scorching sun to film particular shots. Of course, their hard work paid off when their film got the maximum table-thumping response for the humour quotient at Confluence.
The team stood by for hours filming people trying to cross huge and complicated barricades, those who tried their best dodging traffic to cross a road and filmed endless shot of bikes and auto rickshaws gladly zooming on the footpaths to reach their destination. The film had clips of women in saris struggling to jump over a barricade and women who dared the traffic and thought of crossing but even minutes later found themselves right in the middle of the road and neither here nor there. One lady in particular just walked back from where she had started.
We also found out that the law says that after every 250 metres of a road, there needs to be a crossing for pedestrians, but often there are none for long stretches, added Bharat. The law also says that a footpath has to measure 1.5 metres in width but that space is encroached on by everybody except a pedestrian hawkers, bikers and auto rickshaws who use it as if it is the road extension, public toilets, and beggars for whom it is home.
While the film was shot in Bangalore, Bharat says the state of pedestrians is no better in other metros like Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai. “Where does one find a proper footpath for people to walk? People have to struggle to for a foot space and that is what we tried to bring out in the movie,” said Bharat. There were authorities, pedestrians, activists and others in the film who all said just one thing, Hey, let me cross.”
This movie won a joint first prize.
War Widows: Mithila Mehta from the first year of Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA) thought of making a film on war widows because she had heard and known that the lot are given a deal as inhumane as it was in the bygone days when widows were treated liked servants. Mithila spent a few weeks in Maharashtra’s quaint town Satara for the shoot. Satara was the military capital of our country and in the years 1943-46, it ran a parallel government even when the British rule India, she described.
Mithila found out that there were thousands of war widows in Satara and spoke to some 10-12. Her film consisted of a lot of close-ups shots of the women. The wrinkles and despair on their face more than conveyed the message across.
All the war widows spoke about how they had not got a single paisa from the government after losing their husband in the Army. They had been dependent on relatives or did odd jobs to keep their families going. Most women lived in abject poverty and in a sense stopped living post their hubands’ death.
One lady cried while speaking about how her husband died when she was pregnant with her first child. The film cleverly shot the framed pictures of the deceased army men with fresh garlands and the voice over said that the framed picture was all that they got from the government.
Besides the war widows, there were also the children of the war widows who spoke in the film and were already cynical of the system. Ironically, many of the children were now in the Army but told Mithila that the practice of forcing the lady to marry her brother-in-law was a farce and had to be ended immediately.
Activists said that this law had been framed so that the pension remained in the family and the husbands family benefited from the pension. There were bankers spoken to in the film who said that there were too many war widows and trying to keep an account of the details for pension was an issue.
War widows told Mithali that every time they make a trip to a government office or a bank, they are only told to come back later. Politicians promise the media petrol pumps for war widows but when I went and tried to get one, it was denied to me, said a war widow.
Most of the women in the film spoke in Marathi but there were subtitles to the film. Mithilas movie won the second prize.
Diamond Workers: Ambar Deep, a second year student from IIM Ahmedabad along with Aashwit Mahajan, Chaitanya Rao, Debanjan Dey and Mohit Garg worked on a film on diamond workers. What spurred the five of them to choose this subject was the fact that post recession, hundreds of them had committed suicide but not being from an elite part of society, their death hardly mattered.
“The workers went home for Diwali and when they came back, there was no job for them. This is despite the fact that there were policies in place to help them. Just that these policies never get to them,” said Ambar.
The team shot diamond workers in Ahmedabad where the industry is only second in number to that of Surat. They discovered that many were still living lives of despair and saw absolutely no hope for the future. The IIM Ahmedabad student told PaGaLGuY that the law which is supposed to help diamond workers in this situation entailed that he or she be trained in some skill and given about Rs 100 a day for a few months. But the irony was that this scheme put out by the government wanted to target only some 15,000 workers from the affected 4 lakh.
“And what we found was that of the 15,000 only 800 actually got the benefit of the law. Whether it was benefit, we cannot say, said Ambar Deep. The team spoke to one worker who availed of the governments gesture and said that she did not benefit since the skill taught to her was of no use anywhere else so the whole exercise was also futile in a way.
The film came with a strong message that a diamond may look beautiful around a ladys neck or her ring finger but what is not so beautiful are the hungry children and hopeless families that worked to make it.
PaGaLGuY.com is the Official Management Portal of Confluence 2010.