In a World Hooked to Bad News, These Founders Bet on Positive Stories Before They Were Viral |
How can you leverage the internet to drive large-scale social change?
In 2008, Dhimant Parekh and Anuradha Kedia, graduates of the Indian School of Business, held full-time corporate roles. Starting a media company wasn’t on the cards, but the arrival of the morning newspaper was a proverbial nudge in this direction.
War, climate change, disease, declining sex ratios, an uptick in the number of school dropouts, rape, and growing human-animal conflict— the news was doing its job; it was reporting the problem.
Yet, Anuradha and Dhimant wondered: who was reporting on the solutions?
“Despite the pocket of goodness all around, the news wasn’t covering any of it. We almost felt like it was our duty to start disseminating this information,” Anuradha points out.
Now, 17 years later, they recall that moment as when the idea for The Better India was seeded. And it’s never wavered from its purpose: to be a constructive rebuttal to what otherwise parades as news.
But a paragraph doesn’t do justice to the late nights, doubt, and Herculean effort that went into formalising the idea into a startup. “There was no playbook,” as Dhimant puts it, referencing the lack of peer media outlets from which they could borrow lessons.
It compounded the challenge, but the way they see it, it handed them the pen to create a blueprint for pragmatic journalism in India.
And every time doubt crept in — “not that something like this should be built, but rather if we would be able to build it”, Dhimant interjects — conviction would step in as GPS, and they’d keep going. “There were (and are) people making such a difference in society, and there needed to be a voice for them,” he says.
The Better India is that voice.
I stumbled upon it one random afternoon in 2021.
While doomscrolling through Facebook, I recognised a familiar face. Known in the neighbourhood as ‘the guy who builds food forests’, I found myself staring at George Remedios’ journey brought to life through video, so thoughtfully, it was almost like I was seeing........