Originally published as part of Khabar Lahariya’s long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G“ ♦
A few years ago, a daroga, or excise officer, was investigating a local leader in Mahoba, Uttar Pradesh for bootlegging liquor. The daroga, a Dalit, sanctioned a raid on the upper-caste neta’s home. Khabar Lahariya reporter Suneeta Prajapati, who had her eye on the story, watched as WhatsApp groups lit up in support of the leader, who resorted to casteist slurs to express his anger. Suneeta took some screenshots and wrote a post on Facebook about the abuse at around 10pm that night.
Comments rolled in immediately. ‘I was the only one who had put it on FB and I had garnered a lot of support for the daroga, for the cause,’ Suneeta remembers. ‘Many people lauded my bravery. Urged by all the commentbaazi on my FB, the daroga decided to take the matter to court also.’
But then, the late-night phone calls started. People called to say, ‘You’re our local girl. You are our daughter, our sister. You should delete this. It’s better if you delete this.’ Suneeta ignored them at first, then started having second thoughts. ‘We all have to live here together,’ she considered. Reasoning that leaders would be less likely to cross this line, knowing there were some consequences, she deleted the post by 11am the next morning.
With the benefit of hindsight and a great deal more experience at KL, Suneeta now regrets not taking a firmer stand when it came to a caste-related issue. True, people threatened her, saying that if she hadn’t deleted the post, they would have ‘fixed’ her. But this is the kind of negotiation this mineworker’s daughter now deals with daily without flinching –– especially in her own crime-related show, Jasoos Ya Journalist. ‘Maybe they were just talking. There’s a big difference between saying and doing,’ she reflects.
There are many, many more straightforwardly empowering stories, the kind funders file under ‘Impact’, that we could tell you about Suneeta and her colleagues at KL from over the last 18 years. But this one offers a clear view of the challenges and potential impact of journalism done at a local scale and at a human level. In most of our stories, the stakes are relatively high for both reporter and community involved. Located in, and writing from, the resource-starved margins of southeastern Uttar Pradesh and northeastern Madhya Pradesh, KL reporters come up against gender inequality, corruption, economic disparity, and caste and religious discrimination every single day. And we push back.
All around us, there’s a bloodbath going on in the Indian media. From digital startups to traditional behemoths, huge layoffs and salary cuts in the name of the Covid-19 crisis have become a regular occurrence. Depending on how you look at it, the pandemic is either the last straw, or just a convenient excuse for ‘cost rationalisation’ in an already ailing ecosystem. Media companies beholden to advertisers and business owners have little impetus to build a truly engaged, sustained, supportive readership. More crucially, they have little real incentive to invest in journalists whose work is divorced from the money-making side of operations.
Things haven’t been easy at Khabar Lahariya during this time, and we share many of the same issues as our advertising-driven news sources –– after all, they set the rules for the media environment we all have to contend with. But over nearly two decades, we’ve also developed a model that puts people first. Skill-building, mentoring and media training are as fundamental to KL’s mission as gathering and reporting the news. Besides the clear advantage this gives us in a world filled with fake information and little accountability, it also means that our institutional core reflects our mission. At KL, we’ve never paid lip service to token representation –– we are and always will be a diverse newsroom. From our editor-in-chief to our junior reporters, a Dalit, Adivasi, or religious minority background is the rule rather than the exception, and all our staff identify as women.
While we usually aim to cover youth, technology and social change in this series, our own stories naturally intersect with all of these issues, embedded as we are within our constituency of rural and small-town North India. For our 18th birthday anniversary, we’re sharing our story, which we believe also offers some hope for building more sustainable, meaningful media futures.
FROM LITERACY TO TECH SAVVINESS
Shivdevi attended school for a few years, but after a teacher hit her for not knowing her multiplication tables, she stopped. She was married soon after that, and the fights with her in-laws, usually related to dowry, began almost immediately. Shivdevi had just had her third child when she heard of an opportunity to attend a literacy programme in Karwi, meant for Adivasi women, and Dalit women like her. Her in-laws were dead set against it. They fought her until they threw her out. Leaving her three-month-old daughter in the care of her parents, Shivdevi went off to invest in her own future.
Even then, becoming a journalist was nowhere on her horizon. It’s not exactly the most common career dream for young women from rural and small-town UP. While women with degrees typically pursue jobs in teaching or nursing, those without much schooling may find work outside of traditional agricultural and domestic roles in beauty parlours and entertainment. Even in surveys predominated by urban and mainstream newsrooms, as of 2018, Indian women represented only 25 percent of the media workforce, and earned far less than their male colleagues. Our experience in the hinterland is of even starker gender barriers, which we’ve catalogued in surveys and reports over the years.
Much has been made of the mobile revolution in India, and its effects have been wide-ranging. But while technology opens up a new space for rural women, they’re also the last to access that space, if at all. According to a recent report, of the 26 percent of the Indian population with access to the internet, 89 percent of the users are male, and only 27 percent live in smaller cities. The gender gap between men and women owning mobile phones is narrowing, but slowly and with many caveats. Women’s phone usage is more often subject to monitoring and censorship by family members than not. They are also far more frequently the targets of various kinds of trolling and harassment once they are online.
The discrepancy in access harkens back to a much older gap –– one very familiar to Khabar Lahariya –– of literacy. Even now, female literacy rates in the Bundelkhand region where we work are under 55 percent (according to the last census). In the early 1990s, these were far worse, with the literacy rate among Scheduled Caste women an abysmal 4.7 percent or lower (compared to 23.76 percent nationally). Our roots lie in an initiative called Mahila Samakhya, which began working with Dalit and Adivasi women to improve reading skills through programs like the one Shivdevi attended. Eventually, MS also brought out Mahila Dakiya, a broadsheet with local news and information. Published until 1995, it was the precursor to Khabar Lahariya’s newspaper.
When Khabar Lahariya launched as a regional print paper in 2002, some of our earliest journalists were graduates of Mahila Samakhya’s programme, like Shivdevi. Writing in Bundeli first, then Awadhi, Hindi and Bhojpuri, the reporters doubled as distribution agents. KL’s Editor-in-Chief Kavita Bundelkhandi (she changed her surname to own and reflect her roots) recalls “too many firsts altogether. A woman actually had to lift the veil, go into crowded areas, talk to men and work for irregular hours.”
Kavita herself “never dreamed that I could have a job like being a journalist. As Khabar Lahariya grew, we started hiring non-literate women, to give them opportunities to learn the professional skills of reporting, marketing and production, and began the business of publishing a local newspaper.” Unlike most other rural reporters, who double as stringers and ad-sales agents, KL reporters all get a regular salary and medical insurance.
Apart from that, as co-founder Disha Mullick points out, they get “a lot of emotional support, which they need to navigate the public and domestic repercussions of the work they do.”’ Sometimes KL has to intervene in situations where families put down strict restrictions. “The women’s resilience is constantly surprising,” Disha said. “They deal with violence, death, discrimination, and walk miles for stories.” In Banda, reporter Shyamkali says “My family and husband don’t support me in this – they’d prefer that I stay home and do household work. There isn’t a fixed time I return from work, and if I come back late I’m accused of roaming around all day. People will talk, they say.” Still, she perseveres, hoping to support her children’s education through her hard work. She used to be “constantly afraid” but now feels comfortable, “stronger and more daring.”
In the early days, KL functioned out of the head-office in Chitrakoot, which meant some reporters had to travel 45 minutes by train or two-and-a-half hours by bus for production. In terms of sheer kilometre radius, theirs is a wider geographical area than the area covered by city reporters in most mainstream publications. Before mobile usage began penetrating the hinterland, everything had to be reported in person, and mostly on foot.
Mobility meant freedom, but it also meant a lot of slogging in the absence of instantaneous forms of communication. In 2012, reporter Susheela, described how far her work for KL took her. “I travel to Mahua and Durgapur for stories, covering a school with no teacher, or no midday meal. I travel to villages like Tera, Pataura, Ajnai and Belgaum to cover issues women are facing there. I go to a village where ration cards haven’t been released. I distribute papers wherever I go. If I’m travelling by train, I hand them out there.”
But the job commanded respect, and a decent living. Shivdevi, who joined KL in 2010, was the first reporter to put a down-payment on a scooter for herself. She was also able to buy a piece of land for herself. Besides tangible assets, she gained immeasurable self-confidence. ‘Visiting all the departments, I have to speak to all kinds of people. Some people answer me in English and I’m unable to respond to them as I haven’t studied English. But now, I tell them our papers are in Bundeli and ask them to speak in our language. And they do.’
She’s had her mettle tested in more extreme ways too. During the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Shivdevi was out distributing copies of Khabar Lahariya when she was surrounded by a group of Thakur men. They snatched her newspapers and her camera, abused her and accused her of being a supporter of the Bahujan Samaj Party. When she was finally let go, she went to the police to file a complaint, where she was scoffed at and dismissed. That hasn’t stopped her from continuing to report on district administration, the local sand mafia, and more thorny subjects.
Even after the odds she had already overcome, Shivdevi remembers, ‘It was not easy to become a journalist.” She had to overcome her nervousness about her tools first. “When I was given the big camera, I was scared to operate it and my photos wouldn’t always be good. Later we got mobile phone cameras. I had no idea how to hold it, how to click a photo. I had to ask what to do when my phone got full of data.’
As the media ecosystem changed, KL quickly adapted to a digital-first world. “We were more vulnerable with the growing unsustainability of print media,” Disha recalled. KL went online in 2013, and by 2018 was online-only. In interviews with some potential reporters “we’d just give them a phone and watch them type an SMS for the first time in their lives,” recalled Disha. “We’ve always experienced women’s learning of technology as a joyful and liberating process. The reporters were mostly really keen to own and navigate the newer (still male) world of digital. The challenge was that there was nothing to quite replace the concrete identity that a concrete product –– the paper –– gave reporters while out in the field.’ That would soon change as 4G speeds made video-first journalism possible.
NEWS AND THE DIGITAL NATIVES
Alima Tarannum, 22, grew up in Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh. It was just her and her mother who, despite being visually impaired, taught Alima Urdu. In turn, the two taught the kids in their mohalla, while Alima also started attending a sarkari school around age seven, and then a private school with a scholarship. Once she passed class ten, her mother began pushing her to get married, even as Alima began working at a local NGO. ‘Not unless we can stay together,’ Alima would reply. Meanwhile, she dipped her toe into citizen journalism, making videos of various injustices she noticed around her mohalla and putting them up on Facebook.
When Kavita visited the NGO two years ago, she noticed Alima’s enthusiasm for making videos. KL had been shifting to a video-first approach in reporting as well, and Kavita was impressed. ‘Why don’t you apply to KL, since you clearly like doing this?’ she told her.
The penetration of 4G internet has made this video-centric approach possible, and in many ways video is a better fit for small-town India. “Our audience thrives on the oral and audio visual,” Disha pointed out. “Both internally and externally, the shift to video has worked well. The audience has grown exponentially. For the non-local audience, it’s been really exciting to put that landscape and unlikely informants and interviewees on camera.” Training reporters has also become a tighter process as video is in many ways a more liberating medium than print.
‘Over time, we saw that literacy level really has little to do with how good a reporter you make,’ Disha said. ‘You can learn how to communicate a news story or any story, but you have to have the physical and social skills to capture it first. The people who’ve done best at KL haven’t necessarily been the ones with the best writing skills; they are the ones with a fire to report, to find the least likely story.” It takes some chutzpah to stick a camera in someone’s face, but it’s also empowering, and exhilarating. The mobile camera and mic have become the reporter’s insignia, just as the physical paper once was.
Alima started reporting in her own mohalla, venturing out further out as her confidence grew. During the last MP elections, she and Suneeta covered voting trends with a vox pop that drew a big crowd of men, which they ably wrangled. Alima also did a story on why women weren’t out voting (because, crowds of men). Soon she was able to buy her own scooter and earn her 12th-pass alongside. After two years at KL, Alima finally did get married a few months ago. But on her own terms.
‘Families and in-laws oppose all this,’ Kavita pointed out. ‘On average, five out of every 15 women we trained would stay, the rest would drop out mid-way, submitting to the societal pressure.’ But Disha thinks ‘Maybe things are changing in terms of mobility for women and the greater need for women to work. Both Alima, and Suneeta, who also got married this year, told their future in-laws they would only tie the knot if they could continue to work at KL.’
Suneeta’s experience with the power and perils of social media in her daroga post showed how navigating offline repercussions are a major part of being online, especially for marginalised women. Suneeta was born in Mahoba, into a mineworkers’ family in a region rich in granite, diaspore and sand. Her village is coated with a thin white dust that comes from the continual blasting of the adjacent quarry. Her sister died of tuberculosis, exacerbated by that dust, when she was young. Suneeta herself worked in the quarry as a girl, putting herself through school with the money she was able to earn.
She liked “the way boys carry themselves in the world” and dreamed of wearing the uniform of a police officer and carrying a gun. She traded the gun for a pen and mobile, but brought her passion for pursuing justice when she joined KL in 2012, at age 18. ‘I don’t think I am afraid of anything,’ Suneeta says. ‘If at all, of being house-bound, the way women usually are.’
Over the years, Suneeta’s taken on the nexus between politicians, media and mining contractors, and in exposing the conditions of work in the mines. Her stories have focused on issues like compensation for deaths due to hazardous working conditions, and the long-term effects of living on the edge of a quarry on people’s health. And she’s expanded her reporting to issues like discrimination, co-reporting a lesbian love story from Hamirpur that set the phones ringing in our Delhi office, with calls from cosmopolitan readers delighting in small-town ‘edge’. At each step, Suneeta’s learned more about what it means to engage with a wide online audience. Sometimes this experience has led to great public discussions, like a panel on trolling in Delhi, or a media event with Barkha Dutt. At other times, it means realising how easily public information can be abused.
A few years before Suneeta joined, for much of 2015, KL became the target of an obsessive phone stalker. He started wanting to converse about love, and progressed to threats of violence and murder. Kavita recalled at the time “When we didn’t answer, he’d message, and message again, and again. Call me please. Love story ke message. He’d call me at night, and I’d be able to hear a blue film in the background. Talk dirty to me, he’d say, madarchodi batein karo, else I’ll have you kidnapped and raped, many times over. Wherever you hide, I’ll find you. You and everyone in your team. I’ll take your journalism and shove it up your ass.”The issue was compounded by lackadaisical local cops; it took months and a report in urban, English-language media to get them to finally arrest the offender.
When Suneeta first started using Facebook, ‘I didn’t really know that if I put up a picture, thousands of people can view it, even download it. I mean, there was no comprehension of this concept.’ After a few minor wake-up calls, she uses her privacy settings diligently, given the ubiquity of morphed photos and other kinds of misuse. “My parents have zero understanding of the internet and how it works. They only understand that I do some reporting work, I go to jan sabhas, I go to thanas, etc. They can never fathom, in this lifetime at least, that the internet is another world. They have no inkling of it.”
PUSHING BACK AND MOVING FORWARD
Like Suneeta, Kumkum Yadav keeps her family’s access to her professional and personal online life on a strict ‘need-to-know’ basis. From a farming community in the Tarun block of Ayodhya/Faizabad, she’s the first woman in her household to complete a college degree or to hold a job. She dreams of cracking the intensely competitive civil services exam, for which she’s taken coaching classes. She has also taken exams for the state police and intelligence bureaus. ‘I’d like to work in the government, especially on the block or district level,’ she says.
But Kumkum has also found it greatly satisfying to hold government officials to account. It is a right that Kumkum and her colleagues at KL fight for constantly. A couple of years ago, an official told Kumkum to get out of his office when she asked him about the delay in pension distribution to disabled people. ‘He told me that he doesn’t give bytes to women,’ Kumkum recalled. ‘He was general caste, and he asked me my name,’ she added. She’s gone on to file reports on the Babri Masjid/Ram Mandir conflict and on the use of friendship and gaming apps in Ayodhya.
The patronising officials are almost as bad as dismissive ones. When KL won the Chameli Devi Jain Award in 2004, a team went to convey the news to a local district magistrate as part of a PR push. He congratulated them, then suggested that we register ourselves as a self-help group. He’d be happy to disburse funds, for activities like pickle- and papaad-making.
Between then and now, the idea of women reporting in the hinterlands has become a little less outlandish, but respect from peers can be slow to come. In 2018, while the #MeToo movement was at its peak on Twitter, Khabar Lahariya wrote an open letter to document the everyday harassment they have to go through. We pointed particularly to local Whatsapp groups, meant for news, where for every woman from KL, there were over 200 men. ‘These media guys keep hitting on women,’ Kavita told the Quint. ‘We have to keep saying things like we’re married and have kids.” Men with a few Photoshop skills had sent photos of reporters after thoughtfully ‘beautifying’ them. She further related how group members share pornographic material ‘by mistake’. The letter was sent to around 600 local journalists, most of whom responded with silence, or a prayer-hands emoji. Dainik Jagran also carried the letter, after which the comments and photos finally stopped.
The incident, and the attention it garnered suggests that KL has inspiringly eked out its own defensible territory in a largely hostile media landscape. The measurable impact of reporting has kept us going. ‘Technology that is easily accessible to people at the bottom of the pyramid is most effective,’ Kavita observed. In the last few years, ‘YouTube and WhatsApp have revolutionized how people access and share news and they have changed the way our newsroom works in a very positive way. We’ve been able to reach many more women and non-literate people in villages through the platform. We’ve seen that our outreach on YouTube is the highest in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh and audience engagement with our news there is also very high.” KL’s channel now reaches 10 million viewers per month, and has close to 4.5 lakh subscribers.
We’ve also translated some of this popularity into collaborations. Digital platforms “have made news travel across locations,” says Kavita. ‘We’ve seen that in the way some large urban/English platforms are collaborating with smaller, non-urban news platforms.’
Consumers in cities are hungry for information about the rest of the country, their appetites whet perhaps by various gritty rural web series. Businesses too want a piece of the rural Indian pie. Yet “for all our millions of views,” Disha says, “it’s always a fight to convince big corporations or big tech –– for all their interest in the local and the rural, to invest in us.” YouTube (and TikTok, and Likee) is now full of rural content being created by small collectives or individuals with an interest. Harnessing and directing that energy –– to communicate the problems of the world around us in a way that holds specific people accountable in an actionable way –– has been KL’s strong suit to date.
This is worth remembering in a media environment where ‘the numbers’ have taken on outsize importance. More than the views and likes, it’s the particular anecdotes that show how local media can create real accountability. When two Dalits were beaten to death in Chitrakoot, it took a KL video story to finally get authorities to take responsibility for their corpses and for the crime. A woman filed two FIRs against her abusive husband, but the police did not arrest him until KL filed a story about her. In Naraini block, a new government health centre was constructed after a story on the collapsing building that preceded it. A road in Bharatkup was built after nearly two years of delay after a KL report. Potholes have been filled and dormant schools reopened.
“Cost and relevance-wise, it makes sense to cover the small stories, the everyday stories,” Disha says. “It builds sustainable media that people trust and can depend on—to access governance, to participate in democracy.” She adds, “It can also be a less inflated model, that doesn’t need huge capital infusion to survive.” This doesn’t mean shying away from hot-button, big-ticket stories. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been reporting on its rural impact, in terms of widespread hunger, a lack of social nets, the looming farmer crises, and the dehumanisation of migrant labourers.
While our stories have questioned the government’s narrative around its handling of the lockdown as a matter of course, we haven’t wasted time getting caught up in the political chest-beating, hand-wringing, mud-slinging and other kinds of signalling that a lot of mainstream media organisations feel obliged to engage in, perhaps to drive views. Instead, our reports have spurred small charities and individuals to action, made local leaders step up to provide rations and other resources, knocked on locked hospital doors, and amplified labourers’ voices to reach their families and representatives. This is what journalists do, and that’s what we’ll keep doing.