NEW DELHI: Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore has said that media can transform the lives of the people living in rural areas by providing information about welfare schemes.

He said that the emergence of internet and social media has brought about an information revolution in the country. He underlined that there is need to build capacities of rural journalists for establishing better reach to the people in rural areas. 

He stated this in a message read out at the opening of a one-day Regional Media Conference organized by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) on strengthening information dissemination on Government policies and programmes in rural areas at Jobner near Jaipur this week.

About 70 regional journalists including stringers of newspapers and news channels participated in the one-day conference.

One of the major objectives of the conference was receiving feedback from journalists working in rural areas on their information needs. During the interactive sessions, the participants wanted more interactions of this kind in the future and wanted a mechanism for enhanced information flow from PIB on central government schemes to rural journalists.

In his keynote address, senior journalist Yashwant Vyas said that rural journalists have a major role in highlighting issues of local importance on which they should report fearlessly. Senior journalists Rajendra Boda, Pratap Rao, Ashok Chaturvedi and Shakti Singh addressed journalists on issues including role of different media in effective information flow in rural areas. A session on the role of media in disaster management was conducted by Bijendra Singh, who is officer on Special Duty of the State Disaster Management Department of Rajasthan. 

The participants were also given orientation on the role of new/social media in information dissemination.