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Aalap Deboor

Much Much Media x Google India - Vaccination Education

United Way Mumbai brought Much Much Media in to chronicle the vaccination efforts undertaken by Google India.


The most challenging thing about this project was the sheer scope of the shoot. The mandate was to cover a geographical spread of more than 25 districts across seven states. The catch was that we'd only be physically shooting for six days across 10 villages and 2 major cities. The rest of the footage was to be sent in by the local on-ground teams doing the field work.


The MMM team put their brains together and worked on something we ended up calling a 'remote shoot docket' which was essentially a set of (neatly put down) detailed shoot instructions for on-ground teams to adhere to so that the clips coming in would have the same consistency. It wasn't until our very first Zoom call with the full team that we realised the magnitude of what we were trying to scale - around 87 multilingual teams from all over India were on that call, some with as many as 4 to 5 members each, taking instructions from us on how, who and what to shoot.


This was a project bigger than any other we'd done. And we did one for Instagram India in early 2020 where we went to 10+ cities across 6 states over a fortnight to document the mental health situation among college students across the country.


Here, the intent was to chronicle the intensive vaccination efforts undertaken by the volunteers of United Way Mumbai over a nine-month period starting June, 2021. In the wake of the 2nd Covid wave, multiple brands including HDFC, Google, Federal Bank and the Coca Cola Foundation had sponsored vaccination drives across the country with the aim of setting up and fortifying vaccination centers, educating locals about the benefits of inoculation, making vaccines available, and enabling people to have access to them.


As we went along meeting people and documenting their stories, the big problem - we understood - was not the limited or sporadic availability of the vaccines itself. Or setting up and fortifying vaccination centres, or transporting people back and forth. It was the misinformation and lack of awareness about the vaccines. WhatsApp forwards and hearsay had made people believe that the vaccines would have adverse effects on their health - pregnant women, old people and people with comorbidities, especially, were the hardest groups to convince.


The teams everywhere mostly used similar techniques to get their message across; they first approached and tried to convince the village sarpanch/ grampanchayat. Once the heads were on their side, together with asha & anganwadi workers, local municipalities, health officers and ground-level influencers, the teams went door to door handing out pamphlets and organizing information sessions at village squares. This also makes you really think about the kind of influence politicians, local stakeholders and village workers hold over their specific little pockets. In some areas, the teams went around in tempos and jeeps playing Covid-related PSAs on loudspeakers, and in others they even used minivans and tempos to transport the underprivileged to vaccination centres and bring them back home.


Most of these efforts began around the onset of the second wave when cases in the country were at an all-time high. The interventions were timely, and, going by the subsequent downturn in cases since late 2021, have proved effective in making people aware about the virus and getting them to take the vaccine. Lots of stories were heard, lots of change seen. Props to the on-ground teams who - going by the footage we saw - seem to have put some solid effort into their jobs, both to convince locals to take the vaccine and then work their cellphone cameras and DSLRs to shoot their efforts and send them to us!


As a narrative-centric media practice, these kinds of projects are essential to what we do. Much Much stands for (and encourages & facilitates) conversations between diverse sets of people, and what better than grassroots-level chatter to emphasize that mission statement. Going into these kinds of projects we never know what we're going to see and who we're going to cross paths with. But what's indispensable in our process is going in mindfully with open eyes and ears, absorbing everything around, getting as many perspectives as possible, and then sitting down and making sense of it all bit by bit in a way that the narrative unfolds itself to you.

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