Book tells the story of “Khabar Lahariya”, an independent platform that covers communities underserved by traditional media
Por Disha Mullick, com Geeta Devi, Kavita Bundelkhandi, Lakshmi Sharma, Nazni Rizvi, Shyamkali and Suneeta Prajapati.
“The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century, A Collective Biography” (Simon & Schuster India, 2026) conta a história do Khabar LahariyaIndia’s only independent rural outlet run by women. Created in 2002 in Bundelkhand, a region marked by drought and underdevelopment, the newspaper is made up mainly of women from marginalized communities, many without formal education.
Today, it reaches 5 million people a month on digital platforms and has around 24 reporters in 16 districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, areas little covered by traditional media.
The newsroom gained international recognition with “Writing With Fire”, an Oscar-nominated documentary, although its journalists claim that the film only showed part of the vehicle’s history.
Written as a collective biography, “The Good Reporter” combines personal memoirs and reporting episodes to examine the stories journalists choose to tell and how they choose to tell them. The following excerpt goes back to the origins of Khabar Lahariya in a literacy workshop that produced a handmade newspaper that was later sold by the group itself.
O “Khabar Lahariya” grew out of an idea tested in 1993 at a residential adult literacy center run in the 1990s in the Banda district of Uttar Pradesh as part of the “Mahila Samakhya” program. A large-format newspaper was developed in workshops with schoolgirls and distributed to rural communities. It quickly gained popularity. It was the first and only piece of mass communication in the local language, Bundeli, focusing on remote rural audiences and prioritizing stories from their everyday lives.
The core of what we are, local journalists and a local journalistic product, emerged in the 1990s in India. It was a time of globalization, with new types of resources and ideas for “development” work. We emerged in the fertile environment of policies and programs that brought women into the public space as proactive subjects, such as the “Mahila Samakhya” program, which introduced the idea of education as a critical tool and process to empower adult women. Chitrakoot, where we would start “Khabar Lahariya”, was one of the districts in which this program was implemented.
And he was raised by women. This literacy product took on unexpected importance—one that foretold its future outside the developmental world into which it had been born—when the women who produced it began to price and sell it. Dehati women [termo pejorativo em hindi que significa rural ou caipira]unpad [analfabetas] selling a large format newspaper! Leaving their homes, getting into jeeps and crossing rivers to make people buy and read! And people paid. This spurred the idea of a more permanent local newspaper, which was eventually launched as “Khabar Lahariya” in 2002.
“Khabar Lahariya” was, at its core, a desire to bring stories about everyday rural lives into the public space from the perspective of those considered least likely — because of their caste and their history of exclusion from education — to have a public voice. We were in a privileged place to put this corrective desire into action.
Uttar Pradesh is the largest state in the country, with the largest number of members of Parliament. It is densely populated and, from its cities to the smallest settlements, it firmly and distinctly maintains caste, class and gender norms. Bundelkhand, where Banda is located, lies on the state’s southern border – rocky, drought-stricken and with a history of underdevelopment and poverty.
There, sensational crimes were rife, but the politics of the well-oiled, deeply stratified feudal system, operating within the democratic structure of the panchayat, found little space in the newspapers in circulation. The available newspapers were densely packed with stories in small print, in a language no one spoke or read—in these districts with dismal literacy rates—and included mostly stories about distant cities unrelated to the everyday lives of rural people. They were — and largely still are — owned by large corporations or politicians, and local reporters and correspondents were predominantly from “upper” castes.
“Khabar Lahariya” became the only newspaper that represented rural lives in intimate detail, reported and distributed by women who knew the life and work, the hardships and violence, and the culture of these villages better than anyone else. It was written in the language that we spoke and that our neighbors spoke.
Not knowing how to read was not a barrier; Copies were purchased and read aloud by the often theatrical men found in the village chabutra, or by schoolchildren to their mothers while they cooked and worked.
With the eyes and language of rural women, “Khabar Lahariya” brought an understanding of the functioning of rural public space that no “traditional” newspaper had. It took to the public forum why Kalavati being burned alive by an accidental fire while making chapatis was suspicious:
- why Gangaram Tiwari, with his 3 buffaloes, 10 bighas (a unit of measurement of land, commonly equivalent to 0.6 acre) of land and government employment, had his application for a house under the rural housing program for the poor approved immediately, while landless and ailing Kallu Ahirwar’s application was delayed for years;
- why Tabassum was unable to receive her small widow’s pension from the bank; or why Raju, aka Abbas, a local correspondent with a portfolio of reports praising the local administration, seemed to have more modern amenities in his home than anyone else in the village.
This then became the founding principle of “Khabar Lahariya” and eventually our “brand”: “Your news, in your language”your news, in your language.
Edited excerpt from the book “The Good Reporter”, de Disha Mullick, com Geeta Devi, Kavita Bundelkhandi, Lakshmi Sharma, Nazni Rizvi, Shyamkali and Suneeta Prajapati.
Text translated by Eduardo Perry. Read the in English.
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