Development Communication

Development Communication is a unique course provided by Roopkala Kendro in the entire Asia Pacific region with few countries offering the same. The institute provides the opportunity to young learners to become skilled as planners, managers, designers and implementers to appropriately and optimally utilize communication within the realm of development in this two-year postgraduate course.
The students:

• become acquainted with socio-economic, cultural and political scenario as well as grass root reality of India.
• gain basic understanding of development, communication and media theories and learn how to utilize this knowledge and information to design effective social campaigns for various media including electronic and print media.
• learn research methodologies and how to conduct quantitative and qualitative research, including participatory research, monitoring frameworks and evaluation techniques.
• learn approaches like Social Marketing and Edutainment
• learn project management techniques as applied to organizational management, project co-ordination and facilitation, budgeting and financial planning, networking and advocacy
• learn media and campaign planning
• learn the strategic communication approaches
• receive orientation on thematic development issues like health, nutrition, education, environment, disaster management, etc.
• learn about corporate social responsibility
• receive hands-on training in still photography, traditional media like puppetry, and other art forms like theatre, making of documentary or audiovisual spots, audio programming, web-designing, slide presentations using still photographs etc.
• learn specialized writing skills (script, copy writing/feature writing for newspapers /writing press releases etc.)
• learn archiving and presentation skills and
• learn techniques of different types of documentation and report writing.

The course is participatory and interactive with the opportunity for field visits to understand grassroot situations and interact with potential target communities and audience. The course has semester-end projects in the first three semesters followed by a Final Project in the fourth semester which is the final semester. In all project work, students are associated with different NGOS, private sector organisations, Public Sector Undertakings and Government departments.

The faculties are professionals with significant training skills and experience as practitioners. The guest faculties include subject experts and specialists like Fr. Gaston Roberge, Sunita Menon, Tushar Kanjilal, Prasanto Bose, Snehashish Sur, Samir Goswami, Swapnadeepa Biswas, Subhasis Ganguly, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Debashish Bhattacharya, Arup Sengupta, Arunabha Nandan as well as internal faculties of other disciplines like direction, motion picture photography, editing, sound, animation creation and direction.

The two-year course will enable students to work as development communicators as well as planners and managers in any development projects.