This TED Talk features journalist Gangadar Patil recorded live at TED 2019.

I'm a journalist, and I know how frustrating it gets when most of your stories go unnoticed.

I felt it when I worked as a local reporter in my hometown Belgam in India.

I thought maybe joining a national

newspaper would help. So went through professional training and worked with India's three national

newspaper. During my five-year stint, I used to travel from my stories. It was in early 2012,

I traveled thousand miles from Mumbai to a coastal village in South India.

I was there to do a story on environment risk of a nuclear power plant.

When I spoke to local activists, he said the story of hundreds of villages protesting against the nuclear power plant

was reported by a local media six months

before national TV channels picked it up. I had similar experiences when I traveled for other stories.

It confirmed my belief that a local reporter knows a story much before it is picked up by national

media, but like me, they did not have a platform to share them.

According to a 2011 media study,

only 2% of India's mainstream media coverage is about rural issues,

even though almost 70% of India's population, 1.3 billion population-level villages.

This is disturbing for a democratic country like India,

where transparency is key to ensure justice to everyone, especially poor.

I was convinced that there is a need to build a platform

to bring out this important story at national level.

So I quit my job with Economic Times in December 2014.

For next six months, I freelanced and also built a database of 20,000 local reporters across India.

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