Most of us are informed of the magnitude, nature, and impact of air pollution in Delhi. Despite the awareness of such a harmful environment around them, people have become habituated to it, resulting in very little action being taken to seriously address it.?
Apart from times when its effect becomes compounded, air pollution is not of as much concern for the society as one expects it to be.
Citizens' habituation to such harmful air may be due to its long-term presence, or it may be due to the difficulty of implementing alternatives that would result in cleaner air, or it may be due to another factor.
With such a normalisation of the current state of the air in Delhi, one must look for new and innovative ways to make people seriously consider the issue. The usual methods have not yielded desired results. The issue of pollution, particularly air pollution in Delhi, has been reduced to rhetoric and social media posts.
Trying to change people's habituated attitude toward the polluted air they breathe, Keele University and AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia have launched an initiative to use storytelling to address Delhi's air pollution problem, ¡°Storytelling for Environmental Change¡±.
While storytelling on a first viewing might appear as a form of entertainment or something of that sort, Storytelling for Environmental Change found the tool promising enough to use it in trying to tackle one of the most gravest problems faced today.?
The motive here is trying to have an impact through positive, relatable, serious stories. The stories can be conveyed or communicated through different tools of storytelling, both conventional and non conventional, traditional and modern mediums.?
¡®Storytelling for Environmental Change¡¯, is a project that examines the potential of participatory approaches to storytelling in tackling the catastrophic challenge of urban air pollution confronting India. The study has a focus on New Delhi, the world¡¯s most polluted city, and is specifically designed to explore the possibilities and challenges generated by the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to environmental advocacy.
The mention of COVID-19 tries to point towards the changes the environment experienced as the people and related activities came to halt during the pandemic. These included cleaner air, cleaner water bodies, return of certain animals to their original habitat, among others. The project is trying to tap in the experiences of that time and try to employ certain aspects of it in the non pandemic society with regards to air pollution.?
The project draws on the fields of media studies, environmental humanities, social movement studies and documentary film practice to propose a collaborative process of co-producing new stories around air pollution. The study envisions an ethically sound and context-specific filmmaking collaboration between grassroots environmental research and advocacy organisations and local documentary filmmakers facilitated by the research team.
As a part of the project, students of Development Communications, AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia are undertaking an advocacy campaign named ¡°The Vayu Saga¡± on tackling air pollution, using the tool of storytelling. The students are working with different tools of storytelling in their campaign, ranging from well known photography, film making to traditional and unconventional tools like comics, puppetry, etc.?
The idea is to convey to people different stories regarding air pollution, its effects, which are relatable and understandable to the common people of the city.?
This, according to them, can at least disturb the habituated self of citizens and make them start to take the issue as seriously as it should be.
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