New web portal for Indian youth launched

(October 19, 2010) The Church in India has launched a new web portal for young people with multimedia and social networking facilities, claiming it to be the first Church site to link its content to mobile phones. Apostolic Nuncio to India Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio launched the site at the concluding function of a national youth convention on Sunday in Shillong, the capital of Christian majority Meghalaya state in the northeast of the country. An estimated 60,000 young people from all over India and especially from northeastern states witnessed the launch along with some 400 priests gathered for the week-long event. The portal www.youthactiv8.org is conceived, developed and maintained in collaboration with ucanews.com, the Bangkok-based Catholic news service specialized in covering the Asian Church. The site, having a full-fledged multimedia and social networking targeted at youth, is first such in the global Church, says Jesuit Father Michael Kelly, executive director of UCA News. The Indian Catholic Youth Movement that functions under the Commission for Youth of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, CBCI, collaborated to develop the site. Rakesh Singh of the youth movement who coordinated the project with UCA News said that India is a world hub of technological development and the Indian youth are well aware of it. Here the Church is meeting them with something that they well understand, Singh said.