“Gaon Connection is an effort to document the amazing changes under way in rural India in the way it thinks, what it eats, what it wears, what it does for entertainment,” said Neelesh Misra, editorial director and co-founder of the newspaper.

“These changes are currently not making space in conventional media platforms,” he said. “72 per cent Indians live in villages but do the villages receive 72 per cent of governemnt funds? This newspaper will speak on such issues and many others,” said Neelesh’s father and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Dr S B Misra, a former geologist, who “became famous after discovering 565 million-year-old fossils in Canada, plugging a hole in Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

“It is commendable that an initiative to start a rural newspaper like Gaon Connection has started from a village. All of us need to strengthen our “Gaon Connection,” including public servants,” Akhilesh Yadav said, launching the first issue.