Chalchitra Abhiyaan

Chalchitra Abhiyaan is a film and media collective based in Shamli district in Uttar Pradesh, India. It covers five districts of Western Uttar Pradesh, Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat, Meerut, Saharanpur.

Filmmaker Nakul Singh Sawhney founded it after working on his acclaimed documentary Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai on the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli district of North India that led to the displacement of over 100,000 people from the sugarcane belt.

Since 2016, the collective has trained people from these areas-both urban and rural-to bring their issues into the public domain through news reports, documentaries and films. Their core team includes riot survivors and former brick kiln workers among others.

They have actively reported on the agrarian crisis, landlessness among the Dalit community, sectarian violence, livelihood, labour rights, politics, and breakdown of the rural economy. These issues are often not reported in corporate mainstream media that focuses on target audience-generated profits.

They are also unique in their dissemination of news. Apart from distributing their reports and films online, they also take their video stories from village to village screening them on projectors at village choupals, panchayats, schools etc. They also screen international cinema in these rural parts, sometimes live translating the film because the illiterate villagers cannot read subtitles.

Since most of the single screens have shut down in small towns in India which were an affordable way for people to watch cinema together, the film screenings are a way to reintroduce collective viewing of quality content and cinema that is no longer accessible in socio-economically marginalised sections of India.

Over the past few years, they have developed dedicated viewership in more than ten villages where on average 60 to 100 people watch films together on a weekly basis. The post-screening discussions on news and cinema create a healthy space to debate, critique, and discuss contemporary issues.

They have been attacked and detained several times for reporting these issues.

They have also been awarded the Digital Empowerment Foundation Award twice for People's Participation and for bringing social change.