Townspeople in Nepal have over 300 newspapers, both good and bad, to choose from. But, so far, the people of the country's 50,000-plus villages, with over 90 per cent of the population, have had none directed specifically at them. That deficiency has now been corrected with the debut of Gaun Ghar, a wall newspaper which is emerging as an important source of information on change and development for the villager.
Posted on the walls of village schools, banks and tea shops, Gaun Ghar seems to have hit its target readership. Men and women on their way to the fields or forest increasingly stop by to go through the tabloid's large type and easy script. Children on their way home from school test themselves on what the latest Gaun Ghar has to say. The twenty by thirty inch poster sized newspaper sometimes does not get pasted and is passed hand to hand.
The newspaper focuses on development issues of special interest to the farmers. It carries special features on subjects such as health, sanitation and the status of women. There is a comic strip across the bottom of the page. "We write and rewrite to make the sentences simple and the ideas clear and direct," says Assistant Editor Kedar Sharma. "We travel all over the hills and come back with first hand news, which makes the copy more interesting," says Sharma.
The push behind Gaun Ghar came from its Editor Hem Bahadur Bista and Bharat Dutt Koirala, Executive Director of the Nepal Press Institute (NPI). In Koirala's words, the idea was to provide the rural people with a newspaper "in their own language." The sheet began publishing in April 1987 with the support of UNICEF, Agriculture Development Bank (ADB) and NPI. The newspaper costs NRs 6 per copy but is sold at a subsidized rate of a rupee each. Voluntary groups such as Action Aid buy Gaun Ghar at cost price and spread it around. Distribution is done using the effective network of ADB's Small Farmers Development Programme.