India Habitat Centre Director-General K G Suresh has said commercialisation and corporatisation of media has led to shrinking space for the social sector in the media landscape.
He was speaking at the conference titled ‘The Social Sector and the role of Media’ held at the India Habitat Centre in collaboration with Prayas, a Delhi-based Juvenile Aid Centre, on Thursday.
“Thanks to commercialisation and corporatisation of media, the space for the social sector has considerably reduced. Once the moral conscience of society, the press today has little time for the voiceless,” he opined.
Suresh also flagged another key structural gap in media for poor reporting of the social sector.
“We train reporters for defence and entertainment, but there is no training for covering health, education, or poverty — the core of the social sector. The credibility of NGOs often comes under the radar — not because of the work they do, but because unscrupulous elements have crept into the sector, tarnishing the image of many who are doing genuinely transformative work,” he added.
Veteran journalist A J Philip recounted how an auditor once accused his organization of spending 85% of a project’s funds on salaries — prompting the founder to withdraw support. “What the report didn’t mention,” he said, “was that this was an education project, and that money went to pay teachers. It’s not mismanagement, it’s the cost of running a school.” His point landed sharply: not all high salary ratios are corruption — sometimes, they reflect the human backbone of social work.
But the problem is not just with the press.
As media educator Pradeep Mathur pointed out, “Let’s be honest — NGOs also don’t know how to relate to the media. They don’t know how to sell their stories.”
He called for a new kind of development communication — one that uses creativity and emotion to make social change visible. Development stories can be news, if told with creativity and empathy, he added.
To drive home his point, Mathur shared a story from his early years in Chandigarh. A colleague, he recalled, was campaigning to promote helmet use. “He could have just written that helmets save lives,” Mathur said. “But instead, he began with a scene — a wife waiting for her husband, dressed for a movie and dinner, only to receive news that he was in the hospital because he wasn’t wearing a helmet.”
The story, he explained, instantly caught readers’ attention. “That’s how development stories should be told — with the same craft and urgency as any front-page headline.”
For others, the solution lies beyond mainstream media. Sandeep Marwah, founder of Marwah Studios and a long-time media promoter, proposed alternatives, “I’ve set up three community radio stations and a television network that highlight unsung social work. If you’re doing something good for the nation, we’ll amplify it,” he said, urging NGOs to build their own communication platforms rather than wait for coverage.
As the discussion wound down, one speaker quipped, “Sometimes NGOs are like that monkey — victims of misplaced attention.” The laughter that followed was uneasy but knowing. Because when the monkey makes news but the mission doesn’t, something vital in journalism — and in our collective conscience — has gone missing.