Digital Rights are Human Rights, launched in July 2022, was a 6-month project that aimed at kick-starting conversations around this concept. For this project, SMART was supported by The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, New Delhi.

The on-ground implementing partners under this project were 10 CSO- led community radios spread across 6 states. The key elements of the project consisted of radio programming, and community outreach activities in the form of group meetings, quizzes and innovative games. An interactive approach that was followed by SMART was to use storytelling as the format of their radio programmes. The team at SMART wove a 16-episode series “Digital Rights are Human Rights” based on a fictional town called Antarjaal Nagar where its citizens come across a problem that highlights important human rights. The target audience of this series consisted of a mix of rural and urban population that were exposed to simple understanding of digital rights.

Along with radio broadcasts, the radio programmes were taken to the community through narrow casting. This approach helped in directly engaging with the community on important issues related to the ever growing digital space. To assess the impact of this intervention, a team from SMART visited the communities of each partner station.