Since the arrival of Covid-19 in the state of Andra Pradesh, India, the NGO Rural Development Trust (RDT), together with local artists and painters, has produced murals in hundreds of villages to communicate the main care measures and prevent the spread of infection to thousands of people.
More than 84 million people live in the state of Andhra Pradesh and about 56 million live in rural areas, with difficult access to television, radio or internet connections. This is why RDT-FVF, an Indian NGO that has been developing various projects to empower rural communities and eradicate poverty in this state for more than 50 years. For this reason, communication is essential to carry out its initiatives, especially considering that more than 26 million people in rural areas of this state are illiterate, according to Indian census data (2011).
In these years, RDT has been able to verify that some information and awareness methods that work better than any social network, reach more people than any magazine and teach more than any newscast, and without new technologies: wall paintings and theatre. They have been carried out to raise awareness about gender violence, environment protection and the importance of education, among others. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, they quickly decided to act along these lines.
According to Sirappa, Director of the organization's Community Health Area, "Initially, we distributed posters, created murals and put on plays. These are ways of communicating that reach all people very effectively, regardless of their level of formal education.
These murals have been painted in central village spaces, always combining illustrations and text in Telugu, the local language of Andhra Pradesh. They have been carried out by the artists we normally work with.”
One of them is Vadla Venkatesulu, who has been painting the murals in RDT for more than 15 years. Besides drawing, he advises on the places where they should be installed. "It's important that the murals are in places that people frequent," says Venkatesulu. "I paint them near bus stops, in shady spaces where people gather, or near roads where all the vehicles pass.”
In some villages, the same people have taken the initiative to paint the murals to prevent the disease, as is the case with 25-year-old artist Somashekar, who has been painting murals in more than 30 villages to raise awareness of Covid-19. Art has no language, it is universal. It's the best way to prevent disease" he says. The government and the authorities of the country have also promoted this idea throughout India.
Somashekhar painting on the public walls of the villages so that the message is easily seen by all. ©RDT
According to Sirappa, the mural is an enduring element of communication, seen every day and therefore very important for local communities, "Mural art is a trasformative communication medium that contains many elements that serve to educate beyond words. Images that symbolize a situation, or that represent an event. Something that has been extremely useful in the current context".
For the Rural Development Trust (RDT), culture and arts education play a key role in the development of any person, and especially in the case of children. It stimulates their creativity, improves their self-esteem and confidence, especially among people in rural and disadvantaged communities, and is undoubtedly a very powerful and effective tool to raise awareness and inform about many issues. This is how RDT began to develop its cultural program in 1978 as a complement to the formal education that children received in public schools.
©RDT
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