About Amitava Bhattacharya

This is how Amitava is a Changemaker:
In 2000, Amitava conceived the idea of social communication business targeting the bottom of the pyramid and started banglanatak dot com. Amitava always had a love for Theatre and its power for direct communication with the audience and realized the untapped potential it has in reaching the rural mass with social messages and in facilitating multitude of theatre and folk groups to earn and sustain themselves. He conceived a community education and capacity building model using Theatre in Development methodologies and got Governmental and Non Governmental organizations convinced about the need, possibility and potential. Today banglanatak has worked across 25000 villages and towns in twenty one states of India. We make community education programmes entertaining, participative and based on local culture. We use tools like street theatre, folk forms, storytelling and masks/hand puppets to capture direct attention of people , tell them new ideas or bring issues to public attention. Local artists performing the shows using local dialect and folk elements easily create a sense of identity. We use theatre based activities to build life skills, communication skills and leadership skills of community groups and grass root service providers. This model also revolutionizes the training process, shifts from existing chalk and talk methods and moves to real participatory learning ensuring people learn by doing. Process of applying theatre in research is another innovation where forum/ invisible theatre is applied to involve community to participate in answering research questions in a complete new method. This model helps in protecting local culture and applying it in reaching out to the people living in media dark areas crossing the barrier of literacy, poverty and lack of availability of infrastructure including electricity. And finally, it generates sustainable livelihood for theatre/ folk performing artists while making a social impact, marking a new beginning in cultural industry, which has the maximum potential in providing livelihood for people without having non-formal education.