International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development 81 International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development Online ISSN: 2349-4182, Print ISSN: 2349-5979; Impact Factor: RJIF 5.72 Received: 17-12-2019; Accepted: 18-01-2020 www.allsubjectjournal.com Volume 7; Issue 2; 2020; Page No. 81-85 Media as a development partner Dr. Bijaya laxmi Panda 1 , Abdul Halim 2 , Mousumi Gupta 3 , Sanjay Kumar 4 1 Asst Manager, Advocacy, Action Against Hunger, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India 2 Asst Manager, Advocacy and Communication, Action Against Hunger, Delhi, India 3 Director Advocacy, Action Against Hunger, Delhi, India 4 Senior Manager, Advocacy, Action Against Hunger, Mumbai, India Abstract The media plays a vital role in creating awareness, mobilizing people and making development participatory through advocacy and by transforming knowledge, skills and techniques to the people. Newspapers are an important form of mass media, which plays a significant role in health promotion and is crucial for social development. The media can make a difference by advocating the importance of good nutrition and its benefits, reaching out and empowering families to prevent causes of under nutrition like diarrhoea, malaria, poor infant feeding practices and poor hygiene practices. The major objective of this paper was to examine how media as a development partner and acts as a change agent. It also assesses the involvement of media in development activities through different strategic engagement of media in Rajasthan. It finds out challenges and suggests measures for the efficiency of the media as a sustainable partner. The media consequently has to be seen as an important partner in the development paradigm, with its own views and agenda, rather than a delivery mechanism for scientific messages. Keywords: media, development, partner, advocacy, change agent Introduction Looking back at the battle against malnutrition, it has become clear what key role advocacy has played. Much progress has been made in tackling malnutrition but there is a huge prerequisite of advocacy that needs to be done in the coming decades. Advocacy is the key to raising awareness through communication tools about a need, building public and political will, setting priorities and improving policies to leverage nutrition outcomes from actions taken across sectors and stakeholders [1] . The media, health professionals and educators are the gatekeepers of today’s food and health information. They determine, for the most part, what consumers hear, read and believe about food and health. Among them, the media is probably nowadays the most important single information source on health and nutrition for the public. Thus, helping journalists to produce factual, intelligible, timely information on those topics is of critical importance. The media can make a difference by advocating the importance of good nutrition and its benefits, reaching out and empowering families to prevent causes of undernutrition like diarrhoea, malaria, poor infant feeding practices and poor hygiene practices. They can also advocate correct health and nutrition behaviour, such as promotion of breastfeeding, handwashing practices, and use of toilets and consumption of safe drinking water, disseminating information about government programmes to enable better utilization of services, disseminating updated scientific information on nutrition and health-s Media as a partner in development The national press definitely has to be transformed into a media of a billion people; they have to play a vital role as partners in India's economic development. In politics, there are two components: political politics and the other important element, development politics. Most of the media give importance to political politics. The nation's important need is development politics. All these rural development programmes are very important and the media should highlight the positive aspects and provide solutions to difficult aspects through nationwide consultations. This will certainly make a difference in the implementation of the programme and bring smiles to the faces of a billion people. Communication is always a two-way process. Communication uses different forms like print, electronic and more recent social media to communicate. Media becomes an empowering tool, a tool that facilitates people’s participation and paves way for development activities. Today, technology has been put to maximum use to effectively communicate the information towards developmental activities. The local and international media plays a vital role as the link between health workers and the larger public. Health authorities educate and entrust the media with essential health information, which is then transmitted to the public in readily accessible formats through a variety of media channels. For instance, in order to disseminate information about avian influenza to the wider public, the U.S. Government tasked the Academy for Educational Development with the responsibility of developing a training program to help the local media understand the complexity of this disease so that they would be able to report about it effectively. The communication media, in the context of development, are generally used to support development initiatives by the dissemination of messages that encourage the public to support development- oriented projects.