News from NICO | Alumni Talk Series - Talk by Deekshith Pai

A talk on Career Opportunities in the Social Sector titled “Communicating with the Communities – the North Eastern Story” was conducted by the Alumni Cell of Nitte Institute of Communication on 17th April 2024 in the Institute.

Deekshith (BA 2019) was working for an NGO, in Majuli district of Assam. Attracting tourists from all over the world, Majuli is an island in the Brahmaputra and the first island to be declared a district in India. Majuli also holds the distinction of being the largest river island in the world.

In the course of his talk, Deekshith spoke of the NGO for whom he was working, the Ayang Trust, set up in 2017 by the trio of Bipin, Aswathy and Dharamjeet, which works in the areas of education, livelihood and community development. Helping economically empower the Missing Tribe, Ayang Trust skills and trains the women weavers and farmers of Majuli.

A district prone to floods and natural calamities, building community resilience is one of the major objectives of the Trust and towards this end, work is on in building flood resistant infrastructure and educating communities in hygiene and sanitation.

As part of the documentation and communication team, he was responsible in ensuring that the good work being done by the Trust was neatly and crisply documented, to be shared with funding agencies and donors. The work involved both communicating and understanding the challenges of the local communities and also in sharing their stories with the outside world.

There is a huge demand for students of media and communication in the social sector which is quickly growing into a huge placement option. He also spoke of the demand for media professionals in documenting and sharing the CSR activities of corporates. All this while, we were only aware of the public and private sectors, but now there is a third and equally important sector in India and that is the social sector, he said. The talk ended with a Question & Answer session, with students posing questions about career opportunities and pay packages in this sector.