Nirantar's courses on participatory material creation have takn on a new form in the last few years. The course was originally meant to impart skills in the production of simple, gender sensitive, absorbing material (newsletters, broadsheets, newspapers and posters) in Hindi or a local language, for rural audiences. The course has been attended by over 150 NGO staff and individuals. In 2008 Nirantar decided to transform the course, moving away from fairly standard newsletters and broadsheets to the idea of community newspapers. The success of Khabar Lahariya has validated Nirantar's idea of newspapers produced by rural, marginalised communities as powerful tools to create a print-rich environment, especially in areas of low literacy.

Designing journalism workshops for rural women and activists with little exposure to mainstream media has been exciting and challenging. Nirantar's course on Rural Journalism trains and provides skills on newsgathering, writing and editing along with building an understanding of gender, rights and development, language and so on. The course design, therefore, is practical, hands-on; its location in a rural/ semi-rural context provides the opportunity for trainees to plunge right into specificities of rural newsgathering. Participants also develop a critical view of the limits and constraints of mainstream media. Perhaps the USP of the course is the involvement of the Khabar Lahariya team in the training process, both to take participants on their beats, but also in the training space, to share their experiences of producing KL.