Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
They did not organise a protest, sit on a dharna or approach a politician. They did not even upload their video on social media themselves.
All it took was a 40-second clip.
Three 15-year-old schoolgirls from Kondivade village in Maharashtra’s Karjat turned a potholed road they travelled on every day into the subject of a short, satirical piece of “ground reporting”. The video travelled far beyond their village, clocked millions of views and eventually forced the administration to take note.
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Soon afterwards, the road was resurfaced.
For Neha Ghare, Jyotsna Mukane and Mansi Pawar, all Class 10 students of Nyan Makarand Vidyalay in Khandape, what began as a simple video shot on a mobile phone became an unexpected lesson in the power of a camera — and of Gen Alpha speaking for itself.
“We did not post it on social media,” Neha told India Today. “One of our classmates had kept it as a status. From there, it was downloaded and shared on social media.”
India Today travelled to Kondivade, around 90 km from Mumbai, to meet the schoolgirls whose improvised reporting managed to do what repeated complaints often fail to achieve: get a broken village road repaired.
PHONE AS MIC, SCHOOL LESSONS AS CAMERA TRAINING
The video itself was simple.
Neha played the reporter, holding her mobile phone like a microphone as she questioned Jyotsna about the state of the road. Mansi stood behind the phone, shooting the video.
There was no production crew, no professional equipment and no prepared political speech.
“We learnt some camera work in our school and implemented it in the video,” Neha said.
Jyotsna, meanwhile, borrowed one of the most memorable lines in the clip from a teacher who travelled to school on a motorcycle.
“I used a line saying, ‘potatla pani pan halat nahi’,” she said, roughly referring to the ride being so rough that even the water inside one’s stomach would not stay still.
She said their teacher, who travelled from a distance every day, had often used the expression while complaining about the condition of the road.
The humour worked because the problem was familiar to everyone in the village.
MONSOON MADE DAILY SCHOOL JOURNEY WORSE
The Karjat-Kondivade road is among several roads in Maharashtra’s Raigad district that deteriorate during the monsoon.
For the three girls, the potholes were not an abstract civic problem.
They were part of their daily journey to school.
Vehicles passing through waterlogged stretches would splash muddy water onto their white uniforms. At other times, the students would get drenched while walking kilometres to school and then spend the rest of the day in wet or stained clothes.
The road had become a regular source of frustration for students and other residents.
Instead of simply complaining, the three friends decided to document it.
Their video did not directly attack the government or name a politician. It simply showed the condition of the road, using humour and the format of a television news report.
That was enough.
THE VIDEO THEY NEVER POSTED WENT VIRAL
Once the video was picked up from a WhatsApp status and began circulating on social media, its reach expanded rapidly.
Millions watched the clip of the teenage “reporter”, “interviewee” and “cameraperson” highlighting a problem that residents had been living with for months.
The attention eventually reached the administration.
The road was resurfaced.
For the girls and their families, that was the biggest result.
“We are proud of what our daughters did. The government needs to take cognisance of such issues,” Neha’s father, Atmaram Ghare, said.
The girls have since received praise from villagers, their families and political leaders.
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray is also likely to meet them, while Cockroach Janata Party leader Abhijeet Dipke praised the students, saying there was “nothing more inspiring than watching Gen Alpha expose the system”.
NO DHARNA, NO SLOGANS, JUST A CAMERA
What makes the Kondivade episode stand out is not merely that three schoolgirls made a viral video.
It is what they did not do.
They did not call for a bandh. They did not sit on the road. They did not launch a political campaign.
They simply turned the camera towards the problem.
The format was familiar to a generation that has grown up consuming short-form videos: a reporter asks a question, someone on the ground answers, and the camera shows the evidence.
But this time, the “reporters” were 15-year-old students and the subject was the road they used every day.
Their satire did what conventional complaints had not.
It made people look.
GEN ALPHA’S 40-SECOND WAKE-UP CALL
The girls say they never expected the video to travel as far as it did.
Nor did they set out to become social media personalities.
Their immediate concern was far more basic: getting to school without muddy water being splashed across their uniforms and without navigating potholes during the monsoon.
Yet the episode has turned the three students into unlikely local voices of civic accountability.
A phone became a microphone. A school lesson in camera work became a tool for documenting a public problem. A teacher’s complaint became the punchline.
And a 40-second video that its creators did not even upload themselves ended with a village road being repaired.
For Kondivade, the message from its youngest reporters was simple: sometimes, all it takes to make the administration listen is to show the problem clearly enough.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
