Jeeva Nagar, Chennai: Using Youtube to expose

The media battle today is centred round eyeballs. Television, the Internet and print newspapers are all competing for reader and viewer attention, to the point of screaming their messages and using a variety of lures to attract an audience.

So how do you get your message across in all this din?

The residents of a residential layout in Chennai's suburbs next to Mangadu and Poonamallee, called Jeeva Nagar, have hit upon the idea of using Youtube to broadcast their own 41 second film on their problems.

Earlier, they used the Right to Information Act, 2005 to get important information from the Mangadu Town Panchayat about the state of their layout and plans for development.

See the short video. The scene is nothing exceptional for Indians, although land here now costs about five million rupees a ground! The Mangadu Town Panchayat apparently does not care, although it expects its pound of flesh whenever a building permission application is filed by a Jeeva Nagar property owner. What is interesting is that this has become a film, titles, credits and all.