Gaon Connection: A paper dedicated to India's villages

By Pranbihanga Borpuzari

We live in an age where there is an information overload. At the click of a mouse relevant and sometimes irrelevant information is available to us. Things are, however, very different in rural India. There are places that have not seen or felt the power of information technology and even mainstream media has bypassed them. Regional and national newspapers generally carry news items that have little or no relevance in rural India. Gaon Connection ( www.gaonconnection.com) plans to change that by being the country’s first professionally run rural newspaper.

The idea of Gaon Connection grew out of a four year old association Neelesh Misra had with his close friend Karan Dalal, centered on a rural school in Uttar Pradesh run by Mishra’s parents. The desire to expand the impact of this effort led to the creation of Gaon Connection. Dalal, a trained lawyer who also heads a large technology company, has now moved on to other ventures, but continues to be associated with Gaon Connection.

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The idea behind Gaon Connection is to fulfill a gap in content that exists when it comes to rural India. “Mainstream newspapers devote only two percent of its space to stories about rural India. I strongly felt that there was a need for a professionally run rural newspaper which impartially fills this gap. Gaon Connection is our attempt to do so,” says Neelesh Misra, Founder & Editorial Director of the newspaper. Gaon Connection aims to become a bridge of information between rural India and urban India, by providing a passageway of content to both sides of the divide.

[caption id=“attachment_837975” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  A screen grab of the website.[/caption]

“In the first five months of its operation, Gaon Connection has been able to establish a strong brand, reader connect and distribution verticals, and we will now move towards escalating circulation and deepening our reach. Our focus area currently is Uttar Pradesh and on the next three months, we will start circulating in Mumbai,” says Misra. According to him, the target group in Mumbai would be the auto and taxi drivers from north India. The paper subsequently plans to move to other states, starting with Bihar.

A former journalist, Misra pens Bollywood lyrics and scripts, narrates stories every night on radio and also dabbles at the paper. As a script writer, he wrote the script for “Ek Tha Tiger”, the Salman Khan blockbuster.

Currently published out of Lucknow, the newspaper prints 10,000 copies and is distributed in 38 out of UP’s 75 districts. One copy of the paper is read by an average of 10 readers, and the paper already has a readership of more than 1,00,000, Misra claims.

Its working model is fairly simple, where news is collected by a network of reporters based in Lucknow and stringers in different areas of India. The distribution model is centered on a series of ‘Connection Centers’ in different districts where representatives pick up copies of the paper from various trains that operate out of Lucknow.

The entire investment in the newspaper so far has come in the form of private funding by the founder. Misra says conversations have now started with investors to raise funding to be able to expand across different states. “We are also about to launch India’s first audio newspaper and a TV show and funding is crucial to carry forward this growth plan,” he says.

With a headcount of 15 as of now, the paper makes limited revenues from subscriptions but going forward, the revenue model will entirely be advertisement based.

“Our biggest challenges are funding and deepening distribution. UP is the biggest, but also the toughest market, and we are trying to find innovative ways to reach out to the population which is currently un-served by newspapers,” says Misra.

Pranbihanga Borpuzari works for Entrepreneur magazine