ITF WORKSHOP ON MASS COMMUNICATION

A Workshop on Advance Communication was organized by International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) at Hotel Bawa International, Mumbai, on 6^th and 7^th January 2014.  26 participants from 15 ITF affiliates in India attended the Workshop.  Com. Vikas Gupte, T.N. Mahendran and Varsha Bhosale from Western Railway Employees’ Union attended the Workshop.

At the outset, Bro. Sangam Tripathi, Regional Director, ITF Asia Pacific, briefed about the purpose of organizing the workshop, which is very overdue.  For the last many years, the need of educating union activists about advance communications and social networking has been felt and ITF was planning to conduct a Communication Workshop in the year 2013 but somehow it prolonged upto January 2014.

After introduction, Mr. Rashid Ali, a Scholar & Asst. Professor, Maldives National University, explained about computer, its functioning and its use in advance communications.  He also talked about new communication techniques through Facebook, Twitter, etc.  After evaluating the knowledge of the participants, 6 groups were formed and each group was assigned a task of culling out information from website on the subjects assigned to them. All the groups made presentation on Power Point on the assigned to them.

On second day, Com. Shiva Gopal Mishra, Gen. Secretary/AIRF, who happened to be in Mumbai, visited the workshop and addressed the participants on the role played by mass communication techniques in transformation of the society.  Thereafter, Mr. Manoranjan Pegu of PSI, explained how to create Blogs, the difference between Twitter, Blogs and Facebook. Mr. Arvind Koshal of ITF, explained on Skype, Viber and Whatsapp and how to use it efficiently for communicating.

While concluding, Bro. Sangam Tripathi emphasized the need of using what were learned in the Workshop on day-to-day functioning and utilizing the latest communication techniques to reach out mass labour and to tickle down information at grass root level.  While taking feedback from the participants, all of them appreciated the workshop and urged for the need of conducting more such workshops for each transport sectors separately so that more and more people will be benefitted out of the same and mass communication measures can be effectively utilized in strengthening unions.