Behind the scenes from a 100-day stir

NEW DELHI: As student-activist Navkiran Natt, 29, joined the farmers’ agitation in November and watched it expand, she thought it was important to keep the protesters informed while preventing the spread of misinformation.

A four-page weekly Trolley Times was born, and Natt became one of the three editorial team members responsible for collating information and producing the trilingual newsletters. Over time, it has started coming out twice a week.

While the printed copies are in Gurmukhi and Hindi, the founders also post the content in English on their website. The first edition was printed on December 18, and since then the circulation has grown from 2,000 to 7,000 copies that get shared by readers across the protest sites at Singhu, Tikri, and Ghazipur.

Apart from stories on the farmer protests and the contentious farm laws, the newsletter also has cartoons, poems, and opinion pieces written by farmer union leaders.

“Some news organisations were offering a false narrative by branding farmers as Khalistani, Maoists, and anti-nationals. We thought there was a need to counter this from within, and bring out the plight of the common farmers,” said Natt.

“The social media circulation of the digital version of our bi-weekly has helped us reach a greater audience.

Since we have allowed people to print it and distribute the newsletter without modifications, people have also been translating it into at least five Indian languages and four foreign languages,” she added.

Natt had nothing to do with journalism or reporting until the protest began -- she is trained dentist who joined the agitation with her family.

She pursued her degree in dental medicine from Chandigarh before opting for film studies at Ambedkar University in 2018. Before joining the farmers’ protest, she was working with am NGO on their 1947 Partition Archives as a paid intern.

She quit the internship after getting involved with the protest.

Associated with the All India Students’ Association (AISA) for over a decade, she was jailed for protesting against a slum demolition in Chandigarh in 2015.

“My parents have also been activists. They are camping with me at Tikri since the first day. Having parents who understand the importance of participating in mass movements definitely helps,” she said.