How citizen reporters in India provide us with some of our best stories

When reporting abroad, it’s important to remember that some of the best stories come directly from people on the ground. So back in October, Guardian Cities visited India on a quest to unearth some of the most interesting ideas, debates, images and videos from the cities of Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, and Surat, a textile hub in Gujarat. We spent time trying to understand daily life, the challenges and opportunities faced by the inhabitants of both cities.

We sought to commission a range of new writers and digital reporters on the ground to help contribute stories for our India Week that began on 24 November. The project was part of our overall citizen reporting programme, which aims to find and train citizen reporters across the world so they’ll be able to deliver stories directly to us.

The two-day training workshop in each city covered storytelling, evidence-finding, verification and ethics, social media and the ways to connect to us through our digital platforms such as GuardianWitness. Among those selected in each city were community activists, media professionals, writers, academics, filmmakers, health professionals and artists. The idea was to help everybody shape their story ideas so they could be pitched in a compelling way to Mike Herd, the editor of Guardian Cities.

In the end, 11 stories were indeed commissioned, ranging from a gay fashion entrepreneur’s shop licence being revoked after a high court upheld a ruling that made same-sex relations a criminal offence, the poor conditions of leather factory workers in Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum, and the effects of flooding in Mumbai.

These workshops showed us that there is a great deal out there which the national and international media are still not covering. You just have to let people tell their stories in their own words...