As Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani's juggernaut rolls down the dusty streets of the countryside and chaotic roads of towns and cities, a mobile van equipped with personal computers, Internet, Direct to Home television and photocopier accompanying the cavalcade has become the cynosure of all eyes, particularly the rural folk.
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Urchins and urbanites, villagers and VIPs crowd around the school van-turned-Media Centre on Wheels with journalists on board filing their stories as it halts at every welcome point along the 6,000-km Rajkot-Delhi Yatra route.
The Centre, which is the hub of journalistic activity during the day, turns into a mobile office of the BJP during the night as the party's media team surf through Internet, passing contents to the headquarters, preparing press releases and photocopying them besides e-mailing photographs and statements to newspapers and news agencies.
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"We felt that as the yatra passes through remote areas, it will be difficult for accompanying journalists to get access to cyber cafes to file their stories from the spot. They also cannot afford to leave the convoy," said Chetanya Kashyap, media in-charge for the Yatra and the brain behind the Mobile Media Centre.
With data entry operators in English and Hindi languages on board and software engineers at hand to help out, this first ever feature of any Advani Yatra so far has become popular with journalists, who are able to keep themselves updated with the internet and television even as the Yatra traverses through remote and far-flung areas.
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The Media Centre is also equipped with a video editing system that can provide short capsules of events to news channels on demand at short notice.
A digital camera lensman and a beta cam photographer are part of the media unit, and keep sending photographs of the meetings and events related to the Leader of Opposition, not just to party headquarters but also to news agencies and newspapers, through the net.
"The van, originally belonging to a school -- the Kasyap Vidyapeeth in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, was refurbished on the expenditure of a couple of lakh rupees," says Kasyap, a member of the party's national council.
"Not only for the news agencies, but also for regional newspapers like ours, the media centre is a big boon. Our handwritten copies too can be scanned and sent through the net," says Sanjay Sharma, Delhi Bureau Chief of Chetana, a daily published from Madhya Pradesh.
To ensure trouble-free operation even in the absence of power supply, the van is equipped with a generator. Once the Yatra is over, the media centre could be put into use for the party's programmes in the remote areas of the country, says Kasyap.
While the hi-tech mobile and phone campaigns of party general secretary Pramod Mahajan failed to yield the desired results for the party in the last Lok Sabha polls, the state-of-the-art Media Centre on wheels is certainly contributing to the Yatra's coverage in the media.
