Indiantelevision.com Team

(6 February 2009 7:30 pm)

MUMBAI: Lokmat Group's recently launched 'MyIndiaMyWay' campaign, themed around democracy, is ready to conclude with an on-ground event next month wherein Home Minister P Chidambaram would field questions from a panel on the stated topic.

And now, with the 'response' that the campaign has witnessed, the Group plans to keep the campaign ongoing as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity, centered on themes that concern the common mass.

Says Lokmat VP - business development Bijoy Sreedhar, "With the first phase of the campaign we have already seen a phenomenal success wherein people from all across Maharashtra including tier II and tier III cities have participated. Hence, we will keep the campaign ongoing to increase the interactivity further."

"However, we are still discussing various themes for our second phase and are yet to finalise on one," he adds.

In a bid to market the first phase of the campaign, which initiated on 25 January, apart from using the newspaper, its television network IBN7 and its online platform lokmat.com as an interactive space to propagate and promote the initiative, Lokmat also included participation from various other media platforms like out-of-home and radio.
Says Sreedhar, "There were almost 2000 responses for participation through sms on the first day itself. We also ran the campaign on various multimedia platforms wherein the response was huge. To tackle the response better we also deployed voice portals, e-mail ids and sms routes to channelise the same."

For the first phase, Lokmat had been dedicating two pages every day with separate format and design, taking up various issues for the "democracy" debate.

The experts who contributed articles for 'MyIndiaMyWay' pages were Nandan Nilekeni, Arvind Kejriwal, Gerson Da Cunha, Sucheta Dalaal, Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, Shah Rukh Khan, Milind Deora, Javed Akthar, Dr Abhay, Dr Rani Bang, ND Manohar, Anand Mahindra, Ram Shewalkar, Deepak Shikarpur, Sonali Kulkarni, Dr Himmatrao Bawaskar, P Sainath, Gurudas Dasgupta, Shobhaa De and Gulzar.

Speaking on the success of the initiative, Lokmat director Bharat Kapadia said, "The people's voice of this country remains unheard. Hence, we decided to give them a voice that's heard, we launched this initiative. Readers could participate in three ways through, question of the day which could be answered by them; then through, raise a question, wherein readers would get answered by the Maharashtra Home Minister or Chief Minister; and thirdly, through feedbacks on experts' articles everyday. All of them could be done through SMSes, emails, letters and phone calls which helped in generating and receiving tremendous response."