At Last, A Village Voice

By Rosha Bajracharya

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 wall of village schools, banks and lea shops, Gaun Ghar seems to have hit its target readership. Men and women on their way to the fields or forest increasingly slop 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 inch by thirty inch poster sized newspaper sometimes does not get pasted and is passed hand to hand.

The newspaper focuses on deve-lopment issues of special interest to the farmers. It carries special features onsubjects 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